Smart Lighting SmartApp and Hue Colors

I am using the SmartLighting app to control my hue bulbs. It seems that all the “White” colors do not work properly on the newer hue light strips. The colors seem to work fine on the 1st generation Hue BR30’s but exhibit a very strong green hue second generation Hue Lightstrip Plus. I see the following:

Soft White: Light Green
White: very light blueish/green
Daylight: dark seafoam blue/green
Warm White: Bright yellowish green.

If I use the default light color control in the hue itself, I also get a very bright green color. Not having this problem on any other hue app, so it must be something to do with the default values, but I cannot find a way to change these. Makes the app almost useless unless I want a very static color like red or something, but even then a few of those colors are very obviously off on these new lightstrips.

It should be noted, that these new lights can produce a lot more colors and are a bunch more vibrant than the first gen bulbs, so perhaps this is why they are off with a green hue.

Anyone else with this problem? How can I get this fixed?

I’ve run into this between my Hue, Hue Go, and LiFX. SmartThings needs some sort of color space mapping to make sure the colors match on all the different bulbs out there. It will just get worse as more hit the market.

2 Likes

Glad i’m not the only one. I think the most annoying part is you cannot add your own colors to their list within the app, so you are stuck with what they have or need to use other apps which don’t have local processing and quite a bit of delay to them making them basically useless for my needs. I’ve contacted support, but I don’t have too much confidence its something that will be fixed quickly :\

I am havinf the same problem with my Hue Go… Smarthings Hue Color Code and Saturance are not compatible with the Hue new line products.

I am using http://www.huecode.com/ for the right code.

Agreed. This is supposed to be handled by each device type to convert 0-100 hue/sat into the correct colors; but that’s heavily reliant on the device’s color gamut. They probably should have went with x/y coordinates. You’d still have problems when you want something outside the range a device can produce, but that’s unavoidable with any system.

That’s not really true. The ST code is fine for the newer A19 bulb because that’s what it was designed for. ST really needs a different Hue Color device type for the various color gamuts. Hue Go and Hue Lightstrip Plus use a wider color gamut, which causes the issue; but it exists for older Hue products that have the wider gamut too. The bulbs are the red Gamut B triangle, Go and Lightstrip plus are Gamut C; while older Lightstrips, Iris, Bloom are the similar Gamut A.

The best solution to your particular problem with white shades is to send Hue a white color temperature value instead of a hue/sat combo. Then all the bulbs could at least produce the same white shades. I’ve asked ST to look into adding the the ‘ct’ parameter and give Hue lights color termperature capability. (Note: this wouldn’t help with the original Lightstrips, or Living Colors like Iris and Bloom because they are only RGB, not RGBW)

1 Like

Can I make these adjustments somehow via the smart light app? Like I said, i’d like to keep the processing local. The webbased stuff is too volatile and regularly fails to work at all, let along 10-15 seconds after the trigger action has happened.

Unfortunately not. You would need custom code in the Hue device type and Hue Connect to pass the color temperature, and Smart Lighting doesn’t have an option to change color temperature yet anyway.

Sorry, I should have specified that it wasn’t a practical solution at this time. I’m surprised you’re seeing such long lag time. 1 second seems like forever sometimes, but my motion lights rarely take even that long; let alone 10-15 seconds.

To be fair, I haven’t used them in quite a few months, because the delay was so bad, but really this should just be something that can be adjusted in their app. I can’t imagine it would take much effort on their part to allow for the customization of colors :D.

Plus, aren’t we trying to get them on board with allowing for more local processing? This is a great reason why. If this were possible, I wouldn’t have a gripe with the system, just with the app and I would write my own alternative.

I just installed 6 Hue bulbs in my Bathroom Vanity.
3 Ambiance White and 3 Ambiance Color (3rd gen)

This problem makes it impossible to use Smart Things to set them to a white that matches. The Ambiance White Bulbs all create white colors with the 4 available Smart Things Selections. The Ambiance Color bulbs all make messed up whites as described by @Tweak3D

So I see no way to get ST to control the color lights and get a decent white. That really stinks. And as usual I find a almost year old thread with this issue and no response/action taken by Smart Things.

Man I can’t wait to get a HA hub that actually works!

I just installed Smart Lights tonight and thought I had FINALLY found a solution for controlling variable lights, colors, and intensities for multiple lights within ST… and then I turned on one of my color lights looking for a 6500k TV backlight.

What a load of crap. I am already fed up with the goofy colors that I’m getting. How can such a powerful and arguably the most requested ST feature not have more support than this?

Frustrating as hell.

1 Like

Me too. Just bought a few osram lightify bulbs, and the smart lighting app by smart things isn’t even close. Daylight is like a blue color, soft white looks more like an ugly day light, green looks blue. blue is purple, etc. Just awful.

I initially felt the same way when I picked up some OSRAM bulbs / tape lights / Gardenspots. Was quite pissed i couldn’t get any reasonable color accuracy out of the smart lighting app. I gave up on using smart lighting app & I use CoRE smart app to make all color / color temp changes. FYI, I also recommend using this device handler with any ORSAM RGBW product. More accurate presets/functions.

For anyone interested, I received this email from support on the subject of the messed up colors in the Smart Lights app:


Thanks for reaching out! I apologize for the frustration being caused by the color variances on your Hue bulbs.

This is something we are aware of, and we are working towards correcting this. It is something that is due to each bulb type handling colors and color commands differently, even between different models of bulbs from the same brand. What means “White” for one bulb can mean “Green” for another, and while Hue is definitely one of our bigger partners it will take a lot of change to how we handle color as a whole to get it corrected and there isn’t a solid ETA on when this will happen.

In any case, I’m happy to pass your feedback on the improvements along as there have been similar suggestions from others as well. If there was anything more that I can help with, feel free to let me know.


Yes I’m interested as I’ve just hit this issue myself having purchased some extra hue lamps, of course i thought the issue was with Hue at first so having wasted my time debugging I find ST to be the problem - again.
Warm white is some rank green colour, I mean wtf.

So, yet again the next device I try to add to SmartThings won’t work. I note this thread is some 12 month old yet ST say they need time to fix this. Getting quite tired of this flaky platform. I’ve contacted ST so I guess I will be receiving a similar “none the wiser” response of “please be patent” too. Still I feel I should contact Phillips to blame them, if not in the hope Phillips might help ST get their smart lighting app fixed if enough complain.

PS: anyone aware of a status page that lets us know what has problems that ST know about?

1 Like

Yeah… I don’t get that either. I would guess that Philips Hue is probably one of (if not the) most popular light integrations with ST… and to have this issue for over a year and “we need more time”… I’m not buying it.

@alex ?

1 Like

I just bought a hue starter kit and was hoping that I could easily turn on my hue bulbs and set them back to their default color setting when I turned on a nearby smart switch. I was very surprised when all the settings in he smart lighting smart app were weird shades as described by the original poster here. It would be really nice to have this fixed!

Noticed this problem w the new richer colour hues…ended up manually setting the colour to energize and for the smartlights app just miss out the colour setup…to get around it for now.
Obviously if you manually change colours you’ll need to manually reset the white back.

I also got lots of older hue colour bulbs which wasn’t previously affected by the issue. So have these setup as energize daylight via smartlights app.
However, as of yesterday it seems Smartthings have been playing around with things! As the energise daylight now looks different with a touch of pink! Looks like someone is changing things on the smartlights app?

See end of this thread for an explanation and please provide feedback.

2 Likes

Hi Lars,

Thanks for you reply. In response to this I have reviewed my collection of hue colour lights once again. I have 2 of the new richer colour hue lights and about 5 of the previous generation of hue colour bulbs.

I currently run the stock ST smart lighting apps on all based upon motion trigger. I have them set as turn on and set color. For all I have them configured as daylight energize setting.

Having retested things again, it appears the new richer hue bulbs are now working as expected! Previously they were showing some shade of green.

However, as mentioned in my previous post the older generation of hue colour bulbs has definitely been affected as I’m no longer getting daylight energize when motion is triggered. Instead it’s showing a slightly warmer shade of white (hint of pink)…so definitely not daylight energize.
I can confirm this by changing the colour to energize via the hue app or via ask Alexa to change colours of the light.

Appreciate if you can feedback to your team, and let me know should you require any specific details to help clarify and rectify this issue?

Look forward to hearing from you…
Regards ,
Hung

1 Like