I was wondering whether there were already Chinese copies of the Philips Hue A19 Bulbs which were compatible with the Philips Hue Bridge as the current price point for ZigBee / Wi-Fi / Z-Wave Color Bulbs is still very high at USD 60 - 90 per color bulb from brands such as but not limited to Philips Hue, LIFX, Zipato, Aeotec.
I ended up with buying and trying out Color Bulbs from the brand Kudled, which is a company with operations in Shenzhen, China.
Note that I am based in Shanghai, China and was able to buy a Kudled Color Bulb for USD 23, still not cheap but significantly more affordable than the closest alternatives at the moment. I personally believe the price point needs to go to about USD 10 per color bulb for mainstream adoption and I expect that this will happen within the next 3-5 years, mainly due to Chinese low-cost suppliers.
So to pair the Kudled Color Bulb with the Philips Hue Bridge I had to turn the light switch on and off rapidly 5 times to get the Kudled Color Bulb in âready to pairâ mode, which it shows by switching colors from blue to red (note that I found this process out coincidentally and this required step is not indicated in any manual to my knowledge).
Once the Philips Hue Bridge is paired with the Kudled Color Bulb the color result is satisfactory but not perfect as the color specs of the Color Kudled Bulbs are not identical to the color specs of the Philips Hue Bulbs.
Below my test results (the left bulb is the Kudled Color Bulb, the 2 right bulbs are Philips Hue Bulbs):
My personal conclusion is that it is workable to have a color bulbs setup combining Kudled Color Bulbs (or any other ZigBee Color Bulbs brand) with a Philips Hue Bridge, but if your goal is to realize a consistent color experience in a single room I would recommend to stick with 1 brand per room for your color bulbs to avoid awkward color inconsistencies.
Some specs I was able to identify:
Rate VoltageïŒ220Vac
Rate PowerïŒ7.5W
Color TemperatureïŒ2700~6500K
Beam AngleïŒ270°
Communication ChannelïŒ2.4G
Accessible Communication RangeïŒ100m
Accessible Network RangeïŒ50m
DimensionïŒĂ60mm*107mm
WeightïŒ90g
SMD3535 RGB Leds
On a subjective level, if I would personally rate the color quality of Philips Hue A19 Bulbs a 9/10 I would at the moment rate Kudled Color Bulbs a 8/10.
I believe not yet, but I expect it should happen before the end of the year. Most likely they or 1 of their partners will start selling the bulbs on Amazon.com.
With regards to the $99 price point, I assume it is a mistake as it would not make sense to price it higher than an original Hue Bulb.
I believe they have not yet properly updated their content management system for international pricings and are using the RMB prices as users in China can buy it for RMB (Chinese Yuan / Renminbi) 99: http://world.taobao.com/item/38362948558.htm
@scyber: Yes, I had confirmed with my supplier prior whether or not the bulbs I bought were compatible with the Hue Bridge.
From my understanding the Hue Bridge uses the ZigBee Light Link (ZLL) profile, whereas the SmartThings Generation 1 Hub uses the ZigBee Home Automation 1.2 profile. These two profiles arenât fully compatible to my knowledge as of today.
So my advice would be is that IF you plan to directly link the bulbs with the SmartThings Hub without a Hue Bridge in between, to then explicitly look for bulbs that support the ZigBee Home Automation 1.2 profile, I do believe AliExpress suppliers should be able to answer that question or explicitly indicate it in the product specs.
@chun Unfortunately the Kudled bulbs still donât seem to be available outside China. Does anyone know of other alternatives or ways to obtain them? The significant price difference over the Hue seems to be worth the little differences.
I see similar products on Aliexpress, but not sure of the quality, and if they will work with ST or the Hue v2 hub, which I recently read does not work with GE bulbs now. Have not verified that claim. They all seem to come with their own âhubâ, which may or may not be needed.
Edit to add, what Iâm ideally looking for is a BR30 (for ceiling lights), RGBW, zigbee, Leviton dimmer compatible bulb. Iâm not sure this even exists?
Iâm not sure if theyâre available yet or where, but Osram Lightify makes one. BR30, zigbee, RGBW and it will be compatible with ST. Not sure what you mean by Leviton dimmer compatible. The bulbâs are their own dimmer. Smart bulbs should never be used with a dimmer at the switch.
By dimmer compatible, for everyday use it would be nice to have a physical switch that anyone could use or dim as needed.
If no smart bulbs have a physical dimmer, that kind of limits options, especially WAF.
The alternatives seem to be:
Smart RGBW bulbs, smart switches (no dimmer), mounted screens running smart tiles at multiple points in different rooms that have a dimmer for the bulbs on the main screen (is that possible? Do the bulbs remember the last dim state if they are turned off, just thinking maybe they are too bright at 100% so want a default 80% brightness.) $$$$
Smart bulbs are designed and intended to always have power, and be controlled on/off/dim entirely through a gateway (like ST).
They, in general, do not retain their last dim or any attributes when physically powered off at the switch. They also can no longer be controlled until power is restored and constantly cutting power can affect the connection of some smart bulbs. When they are turned back most will go to a default warm white at 100% dim level.
I keep saying most because the Osram Lightify bulbs when connected to the Lightify gateway have a firmware update that enables a user defined default in the Lightify app for when the bulbs are power cycled. They are currently the only smart bulb maker system with this function, but they need to be connected to the Lightify system and not ST.
No luck finding the Osram RGBW BR30 or downlight in the market. I gave them a call and they showed zero inventory. Based on the status code, they estimated they might be in the market by end of year. They could not share any pricing, even MSRP, to normal folk. Is anyone here a distributor
No luck finding a Zigbee RGBW BR30 type bulb on Alibaba/Aliexpress.
The electrician wants to install the dimmers soon⊠I am in quite a pickle not knowing how much these things are going to be or when they will be available.
Side note, why are Leviton switches more expensive than the dimmers right now!? $43 vs $45. How does a switch cost more than a dimmer?
There is always the original Hue BR30. I donât know why I didnât mention them before, but they will connect directly to ST and are RGBW (extended color light including color temperature). It is not recommended to connect Hue bulbs directly to ST because their reset procedure must be done by a light link controller (best option is the Lutron Connected Bulb Remote, which didnât exist several months back) and you lose the ability to use all of the great Hue 3rd party apps. That said, I have bulbs directly connected and added the color temperature functionality to the deviceType for great white shade selection in addition to RGB.
@resident1: I recently wanted to buy 2 dozen of Hue-bridge compatible Kudled bulbs and was unfortunately informed that Kudled is currently dealing with a lawsuit initiated by Philips due to the fact that their bulbs are too similar to the original Hue bulbs.
So to my knowledge the Hue-bridge compatible Kudled bulbs have halted production for the time-being.
I believe in general it should be possible to link non-Hue color bulbs with a Hue Bridge as long as the color bulbs use the ZigBee Light Link (ZLL) profile, what I mean is that I donât believe Philips is consciously blocking non-Hue bulbs as the following article shows:
I will notify you once I have identified alternative Hue-bridge compatible Non-Hue color bulbs and will also add them to the following list:
Can you provide a screenshot of what the Device screen looks like in the IDE? I see a line item Data for one of my zigbee devices that says Endpoint: 03 for example. Do you see something similar?
I keep seeing comments about this and I wonder if ST backend doesnât know how to pick just one endpoint when the code dynamically calls it via device.endpointId.
Also, is the white bulb color temperature tunable? It lists the color control cluster, which is strange unless it can do shades of white color temp like the Osram.
If you want something to just work, you can replace the ${endpointId} with 0x0B in the appropriate device type code (any of the older style zigbee device handlers where endpointId was specifically addressed). For light strip, that would be the Osram Flex (should work). For the white bulb, you could use Cree or GE Link I think. They might have the endpoint hardcoded already. Cree was endpoint 10, so you could replace the 10s in that one (usually right after ${device.deviceNetworkId}).
I guess it is the endpoint that is blocking Philips Hue Bridge from detecting the CT bulbs and lightstrips, how can I make them pair up? The odd thing is - the color bulb can pair up easily, firmware issue/bug?
@simic The raw description is the next row under data. I have some bulbs with empty âdataâ and raw description too, I guess it didnât pair up correctly, or unable to get it initially. What other Zigbee/Zwave (Chinese) devices have you tried?
