TLDR: I feel like I wasted a day of my life over the Hue terms and conditions change, and am not convinced that the terms & conditions change panic was worth my time (…and I still “lost”, as I gave in to it). Perhaps you can commiserate with my frustration, or if you’re feeling charitable, tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Long story: Like many of you, I own & operate about a dozen Hue light bulbs, and for many years. Unlike many of you, I am completely new to home assistant; I’ve never used it before. But, reading about the terms & conditions change for Philips Hue, I bought into the hyperbole, and decided I would do something about it.
I bought a Sonoff “P” zigbee dongle, and plugged it into my Unraid server. I set up Home Assistant (first in Docker, then in VM). I tried zigbee2mqtt and/or ZHA back-and-forth several times.
This stuff is NOT user-friendly. Home Assistant wasn’t a terrible experience; it is confusing, but it found & behaved well with most of the stuff in my house… except for those damn light bulbs. Perhaps I’m merely mediocre for this community, but I am easily the most technically savvy person I know in real life, and this was an exercise in frustration just for a dozen light bulbs.
Neither z2m nor zha was ever as good as the Philips hub. Maybe it was my dongle, or the extension cable, or a myriad of other variables I never had to consider with the Philips hub. ZHA was much easier to setup, but it was SLOW, requiring 4 full seconds to change a bulb 10 feet away, and that was when it worked. z2m never found all my bulbs, though its setup was so user-unfriendly it’s possible I was doing something wrong. I don’t think I ever got either system fully set up how I wanted it to be, and I just gave up after hours and hours of frustration. Because my wife expects this stuff to “just work,” I reluctantly went back to the Hue hub and… I had everything reconnected and restored in under an hour. And then, I laughed till I cried–setting up the Philips Hub in home assistant took 10 seconds.
There’s probably a better community than this for my frustration–as it’s not with HA but rather the light bulbs–but perhaps this community can tell me what I’m doing wrong. The idea of a fancy dongle to control my light bulbs without giving in to “the man” is still tempting, but it really needs to just work.
The Phillips bridge has worked basically perfectly for a decade, and works entirely locally. So everyone with Philips bulbs just used the bridge apis from home assistant amd the app.
Up until extremely recently, no one had any will or motivation to make home assistant or anything like it work nicely with the bulbs without a hub. Why put the effort in if the bridge already solves all the problems and locally?
Obviously that has changed and I’m sure some people are trying to figure out how to make this all work nicely without a bridge, but it’s going to take time. Maybe a long time. I wouldn’t expect it to work well soon.
I really appreciate this comment. I didn’t have this knowledge or perspective. Thanks for sharing. I’ll be patient.
There’s already a
for HA that covers the use case where your hue bulbs operate entirely through voice assistants.
I’m hoping this sees expansion into a fully fledged replacement for the physical Phillips hub in the future.
This is my opinion on things.
ZHA support for Hue bulbs is good, but there are swiss-cheese holes. For example, you can’t set power-on behavior on the RGB bulbs I have.
I like to set this, as coming on at 80% power by default should (I hope) increase the longevity of a £25 (full price £50!) lamp.Hopefully, this will inspire a flurry of fix tickets, and people contributing.
As for the bridge, there is a caveat to just leaving it connected to HASS and not using the app: If Signify/Philips ever make a BIG change to the way the interaction works, unless HASS set up two-mode operations with the hub to cover legacy support, people may end up having to update their hub to use the latest version in HASS.
Tip for Australians.
Now that internet connection and account is required you can get a refund on all devices, regardless of age.
Also make sure to complain to the ACCC while you are at it.
Everyone’s got better consumer protections than the most consumerist country in the world
That’s why it’s the most consumerist country in the world tipshead
I have a conbee stick and pretty much everything works fine, without any noticable delay with ZHA. Maybe the hub is operating on a different channel with less interference? It is possible to switch channels in HA, but it requires re-pairing of all devices, so I’ve never dared to try that.
The Home Assistant has gone a long way towards user friendliness, but despite the fact, it’s still not even close.
That’s about the last step I took before I threw in the towel. It was on “auto”, and I tried changing the channel in ZHA and then couldn’t see a single bulb.
Or maybe a different step lost all bulbs? Honestly, it all felt a bit like voodoo.
The Sonoff “P” dongle seems to have a weak signal maybe?
I found when changing the Zigbee channel with Z2M that I needed to reflash the firmware on the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 P dongle to erase its list of device addresses, then delete the coordinator_backup.json so that the list of device addresses is not reimported, and then start pairing my devices from scratch.
Z2M was automatically selecting channel 11 which in my case is the same as Wi-Fi access point nearby which was causing interference leading to significant delays or losses in signals (as well as Wi-Fi performance issues on the 2.4GHz SSID), which seems similar to your issue
You are very correct that it is user-unfriendly, but I haven’t tried with Hue products (I find that IKEA Tradfri bulbs work well with Z2M though)
Oh my! That’s the one thing I didn’t seriously try: flashing new firmware on the Sonoff dongle. I briefly looked into it, but I was having so much other trouble by that point it seemed futile.
That you seriously needed to perform this step is just awful. I’m so sorry!
For sure, my ZigBee network was absolute shit for over a year before adjusting WiFi channel and ZigBee channel. After that, everything has been 100% foolproof
Keep using the hue hub, don’t give it internet access, don’t use the hue app (as that is what will break soon, if I understand correctly). There’s even a paid android app that’s superior to the original app. Unless you want more Zigbee devices, the hue hub bridged into HA should work perfectly fine.
Otherwise, I also have the conbee stick, and Z2M (never used ZHA, had issues with Deconz before I switched), and no issues whatsoever, changes are instant.
Question: While Z2M looks weird, what did you find user-unfriendly about the pairing process? Turning on join mode is pretty straightforward, and then I could just reset the bulbs, and they’d join.
I had trouble resetting the bulbs. Pairing seemed random, though perhaps that’s because resetting was random. Also, the need for an mqtt broker was not intuitive. Overall, the entire process was more complicated than ZHA.
P.s. what is that paid android app??
Resetting bulbs is a hue feature, that doesn’t even require a hub at all. They should blink once reset and then, for me, they always joined Z2M right away.
Also, the need for an mqtt broker was not intuitive
Yeah, I guess that can be weird, I had one anyway for other stuff ;)
android app
It even works with Deconz, but not ZHA or Z2M
I looked online and resetting the bulbs seemed to require a special dimmer switch or something? It doesn’t appear to be possible with just the bulb.
Yeah, but that’s again a pure Hue thing, not related to ZHA, Z2M or anything. Competitor bulbs can be reset by turning them on and off in a pattern, Hue requires you to buy an extra device. If you don’t have one, I’m not sure how you managed to add them to Z2M at all?
Well, yeah. Maybe that was part of the problem? I don’t know.
I haven’t bought a new hue bulb in a while and when these last ones break or burn out I’ll not be buying hue replacements.
Same. When I bought mine, I didn’t know or realize what I was doing. That was like 7 years ago, though.
Same. I figured the price would come down over time… boy was I dumb.
Who wants to pay $50 plus for a dim bulb that incapable of making saturated colors?
I was in the same boat as you, OP. Bunch of Hue products on a Hue bridge, and I switched to Home Assist using the same Sonoff dongle. I installed HA on my NAS in a VM. There was definitely a learning curve, but I was impressed by how quickly Z2M detected my devices. All of my bulbs and a motion sensor are working perfectly, and I have disconnected the Hue bridge. The only device I need to configure is a dimmer switch that I had paired to my livingroom lights. I think that I have to do that manually.
Did you get the “P” or “E” dongle? I heard the “P” one has better compatibility with z2m–which is why I got that one–but the “E” one may have a stronger wireless signal?
Sorry about the delayed reply. I have the P. Our house isn’t big, and there is only one wall between the dongle and everything it needs to reach, so that helps.
I’ve been using HA for a years or two now and still found Zigbee stuff difficult to troubleshoot :-)
That’s simultaneously encouraging and discouraging to hear!
I found a lot of folks for whom everything seemed to just work… my experience wasn’t terrible but I did buy a few hundred bucks worth of Aqura sensors before realizing they weren’t super reliable.
So I’m kinda glad I didn’t get caught up in the Hue TOS fervor. It drives me nanners when they miss a beat ;-)
Sorry I don’t have real tips.
I don’t actually own a Hue bridge and have never used one in my setup, but have about a dozen Hue bulbs (and additional non-Hue bulbs when “budget” options would suffice). I have HA running in Docker on my NAS and Z2M running in Docker on a Pi4 (which also is running my Z-Wave container) placed in a more central location in my house, which has a Sonoff Zigbee. They communicate with each other via gigabit Ethernet. Altogether I have about 50 Zigbee devices on my network.
It did take a bit to get everything set up and communicating with each other, and I specifically chose Zigbee channels that don’t overlap with my WiFi (since they’re both 2.4ghz). But my light response is essentially instantaneous via my HA app or a bound smart switch, so it’s definitely doable without a bridge using existing tech.
The Philips TOS change was the reason I got into Home Assistant. I have the Sonoff ZBdongle-P, which was pre-flashed and uses ZHA. I had an absolutely flawless experience in using that instead of the Hue Bridge so far. Sure, the initial setup took a while but now the lights work without any hiccups whatsoever. Some lights which had problems connecting to the grid with the Hue Bridge before now work even better. Sorry to hear about your experience.
About Home Assistant in general, a lot of research was involved until I got the basics of automation, sensor setup and yaml configuration. I’m controlling stuff like a weather station, my espresso machine states, TV and Amp, and a bunch of environmental sensors. Some of the concepts can feel a little odd at first, but I’m very happy how the whole system turned out. I used OpenHab in the past and that was a much, much worse experience.
I’m really glad it’s working out for you. I have mine still all set up, using the hue hub, but I’m not sure I have a real compelling need to use anything HA offers, yet. It just sits there.
Huh… I’ve had really good experience with z2m and an El cheapo stick from China (~7 dollars)
I’m not using it with home assistant though, using node red for “smarts”
