Trick to get Siri to run Smart things - Such as Non Philips bulbs or anything else

So if you have a Hue lights you know you can connect to Smart things… and if you have siri you can connect to Hue…BUT if you have third party lights that show up in Hue/smartthing apps you cannot use siri as Philips locked that functionality to their own lights only…

So I got to thinking you can set up scenes in Apple Home to set a Philips Hue light to a certain brightness which you can then get Rulemachine ( I know this abandoned - not looked at CORE yet but should work) or Smartrules to switch on the non-phillips lights - even set the colours etc.

edit I have tested this and it works great with Rule Machine (obsolete), CORE and Smartrules

For example

  1. Apple Home:
    Create new Scene called "light me up"
    That changes RealHuebulb1 to a certain brightness eg 82
    Create new scene called "Darkness"
    Switch off RealHuebulb1

  2. Smartthings / Rule Machine Create a Rule to
    Capability / Condition: huebulb1 = 82
    Action True: Set NonHuebulb2 = 100 / Color = Red
    Action False: Switch off NonHueBulb2

  3. Say to Siri "Light me up"
    Should instantly switch on RealHuebulb1 then NonHuebulb2 should come on

4 Siri “Darkness” should turn it off

You could of course use the same ideas to control anything else other than non hue lights.open locks etc - I need to try that on my Yale smart lock - I like the idea that you can use the RealHue Brightness value as a variable - and can set it to only activate in certain modes etc.

Anyone have any other ideas how this might work

Sorry, but I’m confused by the premise. Phillips does not lock out SmartThings from requesting actions on non-hue bulbs attached to the hue bridge. Many people do that, myself included. You could have, for example, GE links attached to the hue bridge and you can still access them from SmartThings.

Or did you just mean that Siri can’t be used to turn on the non-Hue bulbs attached to the bridge? If so, that was an Apple restriction not a Phillips one.

Anyway, Regarding using Phillips hue as a go-between, yes, that can be done and some people do it. The problem is usually lag. For example, there are some people who will turn on a Phillips bulb in yonomi and then when SmartThings realizes that that bulb has come on they have some smartthings event occur even though yonomi and SmartThings don’t work together.

As far as using Siri with SmartThings, that’s easy. Just use Siri to send a voice text to IFTTT as the IF and use the SmartThings channel as the that. You don’t have to tie up any physical devices at all that way. :sunglasses:

@pizzinini

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It was a Phillips restriction…When the Hue 2.0 box came out - it has Siri and it could control ALL lights. At the beginning of the 2016 they introduced a new firmware that locked out ALL third party Lights and there was a massive backlash on Facebook / Twitter etc. so they backed down and allowed third party lights to be seen on the hub again. BUT they blocked Siri from access the non hue bulbs on the system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/3xp048/philips_has_no_intention_to_bring_homekit_support/

Sure your system works well… I use IF a lot but relies on SMS ( flakey for me ) and you have use “Tell home hashtag” and an acknowledgment, So two steps - this methods can just use a single word like “Hulk” / “Hellboy” for green / red etc. Latency is less than 2 seconds for me.

If you have an apple TV this acts as a remote access if you are away from home - also works within a few seconds.

I have it tied to the cheapest white hue bulb - £15 which you can of course still use as normal if you want.

I’d probably only use it for something like a door lock with some sort of other check in place. Location / mode or something

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I think I understand what you are trying to do… you have 100 different brightness levels of a hue bulb and want to use a rule app to perform actions based on a the brightness level that you set via HomeKit.

I guess the only way to find out if this works is to try it out. I don’t have any hue devices so I can’t tell you if the brightness % for the hue hub is equivalent to the % on Smartthings. Maybe you will have to work with brightness ranges (e.g. 10%<x<20%.).

The two other ways of having Siri control Smartthings devices is via tags in SMS to IFTTT (link with n post above - I tried this but found it not very practical to use) or via Homebridge (set up of ~$50 hardware is documented but quite complicated, once it’s running it’s great). If you get your suggested method to work, I would add it as a 3rd “McGyver” option… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Smarttthings only polls the hue bridge about every five seconds. So in the best of all possible cases you’d have to be OK with a “popcorn effect” where the Hue light comes on first and then there is a noticeable two count ( and maybe longer) before the nonHue events happen.

So it comes down to the specific use case and whether that meets your needs.

Sorry for the confusion. It’s not a concept I’ve posted, it is instructions. It works perfectly. Just tried it with CORE and it works really well with a lot more flexibility.

It is limited by scenes you set up in Siri / home as key words triggers. You can’t dynamically change colours drectly from Siri like ‘set lounge to red’ but might be other ways using core?

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Sure. But I think I can live with a 2-5 seconds gap so long as I can say “Flame On” and the room turns red :wink:

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