Take a minute to look at what we are discussing here. The Hue bulbs repeat ZigBee traffic there is no doubt about that. This community (created by SmartThings) has recognized and pointed out they don’t appear to repeat traffic for non Hue devices well, that is all we are saying. But somehow you put all that on SmartThings saying they better figure this stuff out. Well if you were to ask them instead of bash them you would probably find out they don’t officially support Hue bulbs directly connected to the SmartThings hub. And I for one am glad they have this stance and here is why:
I like having my Hue bulbs directly connected to my hub. Even though the Hue bulbs may not be good ZigBee repeaters when connected to a HA profile there are still advantages to doing this. One of the biggest ones for me is my Hue bulbs can be much further away from my hub because my other ZigBee routers will route packets to them. So in other words if I had to connect my Hue bulbs directly to the Hue hub most of my bulls would be out of range. The fact that SmartThings lets them connect saves me a ton of money and they work great for me.
I just had to chime in and say I don’t think it is fair to put that on them. If it wasn’t for this community I highly doubt anyone would even be discussing how well the various light link devices work when connected to the home automation profile. I’m going to say it! I still love my SmartThings network. Yea its been a rocky relationship and she may be high maintenance but she is still the best looking gal at the dance!! I’m not going anywhere.
So I would like to close by saying I’m not going to get in a pissing match over this. If you have technical questions I can help with I will do my best to help answer them but if you want to take this conversation in some other negative direction you will not hear anything more from me.