I’m still looking for some more people to test the migration from the current driver to this new driver before it gets rolled out. If you think you want to give it a go, please DM me.
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The initial version of the driver has been taken down from the channel. It should remain on your hubs, but if you delete it, it will be gone at that point. The new one will be posted after a few more users go through migration testing.
Philips Hue Beta 2023-03-03.08.52.42.37
The newest version has been posted. You can find it in the same invite as the original post. I will also update the original post with instructions to match the newest driver for NEW users. For EXISTING users of the old driver, here is what you need to know:
- Install the new beta driver from the channel
- Go the Hue Hub device in ST → Menu → Driver → Choose the new driver
- Exit the hub device screen and give the driver a chance to migrate your devices
- Restart your ST hub and let it reinitialize
- Go back into the hub device and you will see an option to link your Hue hub. This is required to reauthenticate the driver and give it access to the Hue hub. Choose to link the hub and then press the button on the Hue hub when instructed.
- At this point, everything should be back up and running.
Here are some notes regarding changes in functionality:
- Setting for lighting effects are now centrally controlled in the settings for the Hue hub device
- “Whole Home Groups” have been removed. This is now directly controlled on the Hub device itself.
- Devices are now discovered by going into the Hub, Room or Zone devices. If discovery is run for a room or zone, the results will be limited to that group.
- Your hub can now be re-linked in the event you lose your token or delete it from your Hue setup.
- Lighting effects are now presented as presets in individual lights. This includes candle, fire, sparkle and sunrise effects if available.
- Support for motion sensors, including temperature and illuminance. Motion sensors can also be bypassed so they are not always on and reporting.
- Support for buttons, switches and rotary dials. This can be used in ST automations to control non-Hue devices
- Default presets can be specified in settings for lights/groups to be used when switched on
- Access to Natural Light / Circadian lighting scenes available in the Hue app
- Rewrite of the network stack to make it much faster and more efficient
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I’ve updated. All looks good.
Note, even after rebooting my ST hub I still had to wait quite a few minutes for the option to link to Hue bridge to appear. Just FYI for anyone that may see the same.
Thank you @blueyetisoftware.
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Yes. This is actually because of how ST updates the UI for a device if it changes. It caches the UI and you need to go in and out of the device to trigger them to download the new UI. You probably triggered it by going in to check on it. You will likely see the same thing after visiting all of your migrated devices. The UI will change after going in and out of those as well.
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So far so good! The migration to the new driver was smooth for me. Really liking the motion sensor bypass - makes life a lot easier.
Thanks.
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sorry, I still don’t understand how the hues will behave in the future. ie, without using this driver what will they do? will they be migrated to an official edge drive?or will they continue to work in Lan as I see now in the ide,or will they continue to work in Lan as I see now in the ide
ST will migrate them to their own LAN edge driver. They support turning lights on/off and setting the color/dimmer. If you want anything else from your Hue setup, that is what this driver is for.
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Philips Hue Beta 2023-03-05.22.43.41.26
- Fixed the duration for the sunrise effect (now 1 hour)
- Throttled (aka. slowed) device creation during discovery to encourage ST to properly initialize devices. ST skips steps if we start going too fast for the platform. Seems like they could queue it up, but they don’t.
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Migration seemed to go well for the most part. Hub device was migrated and all the lights with it and there wasn’t any UI caching issues.
However, I had to reboot my hub (aeotec) to get MQTT driver to receive data again and after that, I had to re-link Hue hub and all the lights were left offline. Groups and zones are fine and responds to the automations and I use 99% of time only those so my automations aren’t broken beside, like, one as it’s turning that one light on 
. I can live with that.
When I tried to find lights, it re-discovered half of them, which were left to some partial, not-fully-initialized state so I just removed them as I saw the driver update post dropping to my inbox, going to wait for the hub to update the driver to see if it makes any difference. Though, checking what logs says, driver is receiving 404 from hue hub when trying to refresh lamp info, so I guess that means waiting for the driver update and replacing the old ones with newly discovered
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Discovery of devices in bulk is limited by the platform. You can attempt multiple times. Seems like I can get about 10 at a time before the platform drops them. Any initialization issues should be resolved by rebooting your ST hub. Not sure what this has to do with MQTT. The driver doesn’t interact with that. It’s just a normal LAN driver.
interesting thing, but where is it?
I’ve looked in the hub, room and lamp settings, but can’t find it anywhere. Maybe it needs to be created as a scene in the hue app and then show up in the possible scenes in the rooms?
It would be great to be able to have the “Wake Up” present in the automations of the hue app, but if this is not present on your drive, I think it is not possible to do this, otherwise you would have already done it I think.
Sunrise is only available on certain Hue lights. I know the gradient light strips do it, as well as a few others. If your light supports it, it would be on the individual light (not a group) and it would be available in the presets.
My next goal is to figure this out. I would also like to be able to start and stop Hue animations like wake up routines and their “mimic presence” features. I’m not positive it can be done yet, but I would like to see that as well.
Edit. The V2 API doesn’t support it yet, but looks like it will in the future
Behaviors are used to create and configure automations in the Hue System, however this is under development and at this moment you can only list behaviors
Philips Hue Beta 2023-03-06.23.56.56.37
- Increase throttling to slow device discovery and “help” the platform with processing time
- Fix crash that occurs on v45 ST firmware
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I have updated just today. Everything worked a charm, just like you described!
One thing about your driver that’s so great is that I can make lights blink, which is sooo handy in routines.
Just had to enable lighting effects in the driver settings (just in case someone is wondering why the option might be greyed out).
Wonderful to have skilled people like you who do so much for making the SmartThings experience better and better!
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Thanks for the new driver @blueyetisoftware!
Wanted to let you know I am having an issue where random Rooms show as “Offline” and cannot be controlled in the app. I haven’t tested to see if routines stop functioning when they are in the “Offline” state though.
The only way to fix the “Offline” state is a variation of exiting the app and/or entering the device and pull-to-refresh. It then becomes available again and can be controlled.
Next time this happens, can you check your Hue app to see if it is having communication issues? Go to the Hue app → Settings → Software Update → Devices. If any devices have comms issues, you should see them with a nice orange warning here.
Does this happen with anything besides rooms? There isn’t really anything that can force a room offline since it isn’t a physical device. If it is offline, that means there is a problem with its data. If you are able to grab a log of this, it would be great.
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Philips Hue Beta 2023-03-18.03.08.00.19
- Update to latest ST platform modules
- Prevent failed scene requests from clearing scenes. It will just keep the old ones in place until the next successful request
- Fix bug that could remove the left/right controls from the rotary dial UI
- Block repetitive firing of held events for buttons
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