New Zigbee Hue Device + Helper App

Hi,

@juano2310 has done an excellent job on fixing up the Hue integration. I wanted to cut down my latency on my Hue bulbs, so I dusted off the SmartThings Zigbee Hue device from the IDE and updated it with some things I learned from the Osram device.

The first thing is that I rewrote all of the HSL libraries into HSB. The bulbs should actually reflect the color in the picker now. In addition, I finished the parse() method so that the light level, hue and saturation will update the color picker / sliders as well. This is very useful if you have other apps controlling the colors – your Android or iPhone will stay in sync.

Last, I also created a SmartApp that helps me manage the light when the switch its connected to is off. For those who don’t have z-wave switches, I also added an “unreachable” state in the bulb device. Once the bulb becomes too unreachable, the device turns the bulb state off. This really helps me with my apps.

Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Improved Zigbee Hue Bulb

SmartApp Light Helper

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Does this help with joining a hue directly to the hub? I know there’s big cautions about doing that and I don’t feel like throwing $60 down the drain.

Hi Keith,

I did not modify any code around the pairing process itself. I believe the big gotcha with pairing Hue bulbs is that if your ST Hub is on channel 14, you will not be able to unpair the bulb and move it to a different hub later. Also, if you wipe the config on your hub while the bulb is paired on channel 14, you’re also SOL.

I do not know how to determine if your bulb is on that channel or not. I’ve read some posts that say its random, and I’ve read others that say its always 14. I’ve also read some posts that say you can recover from it.

I paired 10 to my ST hub thus far, and was unable to use ZLL to move 2 of them back to the Philips Hub. Philips has been pretty nice to me too – on the bulbs that I couldn’t unpair, they gave me an RMA.

Sorry if its not the answer you were looking for!

Kristopher

Yea my big concern is if I feel the need to nuke the hub (had to do it once already), or buy the V2 hub the bulb would be bricked.

That’s nice that Phillips worked with you even though it wasn’t their fault.

If ST figured this out I’d probably bite the bullet and take the plunge. Not that they’d make any money off of it.

Just as an FYI I found a defect in the way this bulb was handling light values <7%. I noticed this in the Cree and Osram bulbs too. I patched it on the repo @juano2310

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Great catch, all the dimmers and other lights have this bug too.