Philips Hue and local control, not stable

[violet nexus]

Hi all, I think this is where I'd go for this. I want to do as much as possible locally, so I have a skyconnect doing my zigbee device control, but I have a problem with Hue.

I tried having my Hue devices on my skyconnect, which works really well, and is local, I don't get all the entities, and such not a smuch control.

As I don't have all the controls and entities that I'd have without the Hue controller, I attempted to have two separate Zigbee networks, one with the Hue controller, just controlling the Hue devices, and the skyconnect doing all other devices, but I think I have interferrence, as whenever I tell the Hue device to do anything, it goes offline for a few seconds, then comes back.

I dind't want to use the Hue cloud, as I want to explore all local options first, but am I stuck, if I want full control, I have to use their controller and cloud and treat the hue devices as hue integrated and not zigbee integrated devices?

[cold osprey]

what, specifically, are you missing?

home assistant should expose all of the features of the hue devices themselves. Everything else that you might want to do, you should be able to build using home assistant's automations, scripts, or scenes features.

[fickle radish]

I recently got in to HA, from using hue and samsung smart things. I opened the hue app and deleted all lights etc from the hue bridge. Once deleted from hue, the bulbs were visible to HA using ZigBee dongle I bought.
Now all hue lights are connected directly to HA and the hue bridge is in the bin.

Scenes, groups and automations with motion sensors etc. are all easily set up in HA. All the motion sensors were connected to smart things hub, but now direct to HA and it sees a temperature sensor in them which I never knew existed for years with smartthings hub.. That is also now in the bin 😁

[violet nexus]

Hi.... I love how i ask a question and forget! haha .... a big one for me is that I have a hue go that is battery powered, but I have no battery entity to know when things are actually running low

[hoary dock]

Not entirely true... HA (and any other generic zigbee controller) can only do the regular/basic zigbee commands while Hue has some extensions on top of that. For example their entertainment mode (sync the lights with tv/pc etc.) is a custom extension on top of zigbee. The same applies for the Dynamic scenes, which run on the bulbs themselves (including the natural lights), so it can run without sending a whole bunch of Zigbee commands (and overload the network doing that).

In general, if you already have the Hue bridge and exclusively use Philips Hue products, you are better off staying with the Hue bridge. If you like to have the freedom of using any zigbee product in one (big) mesh and you don't care about any of the Hue unique features, go with ZHA or Z2M.

You can even have both if you want (just make sure that the channels don't overlap and you have enough routing devices to form a stable mesh).

The Philips Hue bridge is also using a low latency, pure local API to HA.In many times, when using Philips Hue only devices, you will notice it will actually perform better than any of the generic methods.

[bleak mason]

interesting.. I recently got rid of my Hue hub because I didn't want their unnecessarily enforced "cloud account". I used ZHA and moved all the same devices - a mix of Hue and Innr bulbs - to it. I've found that the (many) temporary dropouts of bulbs from the Hue hub has gone away completely and the mesh seems to be significantly more stable than it was with Hue.