[ST Edge] Philips Hue Group/Scene Control [DISCONTINUED, SEE NEW VERSION]

I am looking for volunteers interested in alpha testing an Edge driver for the Philips Hue Hub. This will enable group level control of rooms/zones defined in the Hue app, as well as any scenes that are used by those groups. This also sends out group commands rather than individual light commands, so the popcorn effect is reduced if not completely gone. This alpha driver is not intended for continual use and support. The goal of the alpha testing would be to try it out in a wider variety of systems and get some feedback on robustness and features. It will likely get updated (and broken) frequently. This driver can run alongside the ST platform driver for the Hue. They should not interact at all other than increasing traffic to the Hue hub. If you are interested in trying it out with those caveats, please let me know and I will send you an invite once I publish the driver this weekend. Here are the current goals of the driver:

  1. Sync and allow control of Hue scenes
  2. Switch and dimmer control of Hue groups
  3. Group support in automations (ST groups don’t allow automations)
  4. Get rid of the “popcorn” effect inherent in the ST lighting groups
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Impressive goals! :sunglasses: Good luck with the project!

It’s working right now. Plan to post the alpha in a few days once the automation pieces are done. Just want a good group to test it out since there are a bunch of device types and ways to setup Hue. Thanks for editing the post. I moved it in the “Community Apps” group. Should it go there or in “Edge”?

Excellent! That definitely fills a lot of gaps in the smartthings Hue implementation. :sunglasses:

Thanks for editing the post. I moved it in the “Community Apps” group. Should it go there or in “Edge”?

Neither. By convention, it goes in the “community created device types” subforum because they never split off a separate one for edge Drivers. Instead, we add one of the edge tags, in this case lighting, so that people can see what it is and find it more easily in a search. (By the way, you don’t need to use Hue as a tag if it’s also in the title, it would come up in the same searches.) Assuming, of course, that it is an edge driver and not a new smartapp.

The “writing edge type drivers “ section, which did get split off, is for developer questions. Not finished works.

So this gets tagged as an Edge Driver and put in the “community created device types” section of the forum, at least for now.

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Well, this was the hunch I was refering too. I’ll take an invite, but definitely have a few questions on how I could use it in only potions of my home as not to mess up the main lighting.

However, I have the bridge, plenty of hue bulbs, innr led light strips, and gledopto controllers for custom led strip lights.

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The Hue Hub is ultimately in control of the lights and setup. This driver, as well as the ST platform driver both make local requests to the Hue Hub. Since neither driver actually owns the lights, they can live side by side. I’m not planning on replacing the functionality of the ST platform driver for individual lights since it works pretty well, so the long term plan is for these to live side by side when in normal use.

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So my question in the way my mind is thinking, with only an idea of what your creating, would you say that you’ve kind of created a virtual machine? i.e… A virtual hue hub that works in tandem?

Are you seeing a lot of network collisions or major slow downs of the entire network in testing? My network is extremely strong and not wanting to throw a monkey wrench at if possible…haha.

Lastly in testing, I would like to only use my office and spare bathroom as it has all the same lighting as the rest of the house. So if it does crash or create chaos it would possibly on affect those two rooms or is that poossible with testing?

The “hub” used by both this driver and the ST platform driver is really just a stand-in for a network connection to the actual hub. Your Hue hub allows connections from many different clients (ST, Hue App, Hue add-ons, etc). This driver would be an additional connection. This driver technically doesn’t need a hub object, but there will be one to make managing settings simpler and to streamline discovery.

So to simplify it, here is what happens when you interact with the driver. It is the same for most LAN connected hubs.

  1. Press button in ST
  2. Edge driver gets an event and sends a request to the Hue hub (https)
  3. Hue hub processes the request and send the zigbee commands out to the lights
  4. Hue hub updates state internally for other drivers to request in the future

The drivers all connect to the Hue hub and not the lights themselves. To separate them, you would need multiple hubs. There isn’t really much additional traffic from the driver on its own. It would really come down to the automations you setup. If they keep hitting the driver, then the driver will keep making requests. For the simple case of connecting a smart light switch to a light group, you wouldn’t notice a thing.

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Okay, That makes complete sense to me now, so sounds like it should be quiet interesting and extremely cool.

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Will this drive be able to add a “sync” device for spotify music? This feature already exists on Google home and Alexa, but st doesn’t add this possibility.

I would like to participate in the test.

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I wasn’t planning to support the sync device initially although it does fit with the group/scene control theme.

hello can you please share the code. i would like to re-use the scenes selector capability for my driver

At this point, the driver isn’t open source. If you direct message me some questions, I may be able to answer them.

I’m interested to test your driver.
let me know

Tiziano

I’ll send you an invite, but if you are on v43 hub firmware, there is currently an issue that causes it to not work.

Yes i’m on v43, i’ve to wait .

Hi, I’d be interested in testing your driver. Sounds great. I am on FW 42.

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Super keen to try this out!

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Also very interested in testing this out.

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