Hue Lights Refresh/Status - Do you schedule poll under 5 minutes?

Title says it. Is everyone still using a CoRE rule or whatever automation you use to refresh a Hue light every x minutes (under 5 minutes) ?

The official integration already gets the heartbeat status from the hue bridge about every five seconds. That change was put into effect a few months ago. So you should no longer need to do any individual polling, and if you do you run the risk of interfering with some of the regular messaging that’s going on.

Heartbeat status is a special option available through the Hue API which doesn’t require individual polling of the hue bulbs and so is intended to allow for smooth operation. What happens is that the bridge writes a copy of every command that it sends to the bulbs into the heartbeat log and then that’s what is sent in response to the SmartThings’ request for status.

So while we used to need to do individual polling, that’s no longer either required or recommended. :sunglasses:

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Awesome thanks JD.

I know some other people were also polling zwave light switches to get faster status. Do you know if that is still needed ?

Hi @JDRoberts .

My Hue lights show the status after a long delay around 10+ minutes.
Color temp, on/off state, hue degree etc.

Would you know why this happens inspite of the change that ST did to poll the hue bridge?

Sorry, I don’t. Assuming you’re using the hue bridge, that’s an official integration, so I would ask support. It definitely shouldn’t take 10 minutes to update the status.

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Sure thanks. For now, I am using the “pollster” smartapp to poll the bridge every minute. Seems to be working with no apparent degradation of the network system…so far

It also doesn’t work for me inmmediatly but after 5 minutes , so I use webcore to poll every minute.

Where have you found that official integration have changed it to send this data with heart beat from hue bridge to ST?

That happened in August 2016 and was discussed in the forums by SmartThings engineers. It’s in some of the hue discussion threads, I don’t remember exactly which ones.

Does it really work for you ?
Do you see any particular logs in hue brigde or hue bulbs devices in ST ?

Any suggestions what to check ?
I wrte support but i don’t expect much of them.

I’m not using it with SmartThings anymore, so I can’t say personally. I know there are people who have had ongoing issues. You might check with them as they’ll be more up-to-date than I am.

The mentioned thread is about something else, which is delay of turning on a bulb, and not delay of updating it’s status.

I have read some older posts on the forum and the only thing which i have found is ST developers mentioning performing tests of more often polling every 5 Seconds, which was revertd back to 5 mins after some short time as it caused overall delay on phillips hue performance for many users.

Anyway i wrote support for confirmation if hue hub indeed sends heardbeat to ST hub. Will respond when get response from them

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I know the delay thread is about something else, I just thought that since those people are actively monitoring their bridge connections, they might be able to check their logs as you had requested. :sunglasses:

I just tried it, turned off and on a hue light using hue app and then switched to SmartThings and status updated within a couple of seconds.

I am on latest beta of SmartThings.

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I removed hie bridge and all lighs from ST and readded it again, but still doesn’t work as expected.

Do you see any logs or events every 5 sec in ST for Hue bridge ? I see nothing and i wander if this heardbeat is being logged in any way in ST.