As it is right now, a single press of a button on any of my SC7s may or may not do anything. Another press might work, or the first press was finally processed and the lights go on and then off. You can set up a button to dim to a certain level (I do that), but if you want to adjust it gradually good luck with anything other than direct control with the Hue dimmer remote.
I meant if you wanted to use the dimmer but not have it control Hue bulbs. Those switches are wall-mounted, battery operated, single units that cost less than $30. Very attractive if they can be used for whatever you want. Say you want to mount one next to your bed to operate your ceiling fan. There would be no Hue bulbs involved.
All of this assumes that you have a Hue Bridge, but you could use theses handy, inexpensive switches for anything you want, if you can leverage the events as triggers in Rule Machine.
The Lutron Pico remote is another cheap option for use as a dimmer. It has the benefit of being able to fit into a multiple gang box unlike the Hue dimmer. Not sure if there is a device handler for the Pico though.
Just did a quick read on this. So the Pico can be wall mounted, hand-held, or installed in a box? That sounds pretty versatile. Nicer still is that it doesn’t need a Hue bridge. But can Lutron talk to ST? I don’t have any experience with Lutron. Is it Zigbee or Z-Wave, or is it its own thing?
It is its own thing, and there’s no ST support. There is some work on using a rooted Wink hub to connect them to ST. [BETA RELEASE] Lutron support in SmartThings using custom Wink Hub software - looking for testers / the adventurous
They are great little switches. I have a bunch of them. I used to use Staples Connect, which supports them very well. I set up my Staples Connect as a secondary Z-wave controller to my ST, and also set up my Hue lights on Staples Connect. I can use my Pico remotes that way to control Z-wave and Hue lights at the same time. I’d still prefer if they worked directly with ST, though.
On my long list of ST projects is to reverse engineer the Lutron protocol, and build an Arduino device to integrate them into ST. Gonna be a while.
I just merged my development branch into the master, so everyone should see updates available in the IDE. This merges a bunch of stuff from the SmartThings repo that was commited after @infofiend’s initial fork. It also adds a button in color bulbs and groups for colorloop. This is something built into the Hue API which, as the name suggests, loops through colors. Before anyone asks, in the API this is just on or off, there’s no control over speed, colors, etc.
I’m working on additional enhancements which can be seen under the issues of @infofiend’s GitHub repo. The biggest addition is going to be deep integration with @Kristopher’s Circadian Daylight SmartApp. More details to come.
Awesome Clayton. This is really turning into a robust and overall great app thanks to your work.
Great! Everything is working fine for me. My LIFX bulbs aren’t feeling much love lately! Controlling the bulbs via groups has reduced the latency significantly for me. Regarding the color loop, I seem to recall reading in the hue development forum that you can somehow select the beginning and end colors for the loop but not sure where I saw that…
I believe it starts with the current color, and ends whenever you tell it to stop. If I’m not mistaken, you are correct that if you send a color and enable colorloop in the same API call it will start at that specific color. As far as ending, I’m not sure how that would work…it ends at whatever color it’s on when you turn it on.
So I take back what I said about there being no control over color for colorloop…you can control the starting color. That being said, does anyone have any suggestions as to how it could work from an interface standpoint? Also, does anyone care about starting color?
I updated all the device handlers and the manager smart app and now my bulbs and groups don’t seem to power on. I’m at my office so I can’t actually see them but according to ST they will transition to the ‘turning on’ state but never turn on. Multisensors in the area seem to indicate the lights aren’t on either…
So it appears that the on() and off() commands don’t like having the last argument of devicetype.
For example, on the AP Hue Bulb at line 124, if it’s changed to
parent.on(this, transitionTime, level)
…it will turn on.
EDIT I made those changes and everything seems to work now
So to confirm, you’re saying the code posted on GitHub, master branch, is not working as-is? Do you see errors in live logging? I’m about to test again, but I thoroughly tested before merging everything.
EDIT: @sprange, I just tested again and everything is working perfectly for me. Are you sure you updated and published the Device Handlers and the SmartApp?
@sprange: With Anthony’s help it seems like the issue might be the GitHub integration itself with the SmartThings IDE. Could you try copy/pasting the code from GitHub and let us know the result? I’m sorry it’s a bit of a hassle…My only thought is that it’s related to the degraded performance for Developer Tools: http://status.smartthings.com/
Hi
I was at a children’s play last night and crashed early. Will look into this pretty soon.
At risk of sounding really dumb and missing something obvious, how do I set up groups inside of the Hue app so that I can import them into ST with this SmartApp? Is it not by dragging bulbs onto one another one the color chart?
Mark,
I’ve been using Hue Pro to create groups. Technically for me they show up as scenes in the SmartApp. I use the IDE to change the device handler to hue groups and all is well. I don’t use the basic Hue app much…does it even allow groups?
I installed everything, but this time included the Hue Lux device handler (which I didn’t have installed before). I noticed that it has a reference to devicetype so perhaps that’s why everything works fine now!
Thanks for the reply! So maybe I’m not crazy… I’ve been using the stock iOS app. Looks like Hue Pro might be Android only. Got a recommendation for iOS?
@RobtheEngineer has very concise instructions for a smartphone agnostic method for creating groups. From the OP of their SmartApp thread:
The only thing that you might run into is that you have to create an access tolken and use that instead of newdeveloper. Instructions to do that are in the link. This is a more recent security change put in place by Hue.
You shouldn’t need the Lux device handler if you’re not adding any of those types of bulbs, but I’m glad it’s working for you now!