I’m looking at getting Philips Hue light strip for a bedroom and I am very new to HA and smart home devices in general. What would the best option to link the lights to my HA instance? I currently have a rpi4 and it is my understanding that to connect the light strip I would need a “bridge” or something of that sort, does anyone have any suggestions? I was looking at the “ConBee II” but I don’t think I have a place to consistently run it, if I can’t just plug it directly into my pi.
I don’t know if the LED strips are Zigbee compliant but much of Hue devices are, in which case any Zigbee stick should work (if using on your pi make sure you use an extension cable plugged into a POWERED USB hub plugged into your rPi). Otherwise you can buy the Hue hub too.
Both the bulbs and strips are zigbee, I have 3 bulbs and one of the cheaper led strips at the moment connected via a skyconnect to my HA install without issues at this time via the ZHA intergration using the aeotec motion sensors to turn them on and off based on if I am in the room or not at the time.
I’ll be looking into the hue smart plug at a later date as I move more plugs from the lenovo tuya wifi based that require cloud to pure local only zigbee.
As stated in another thread as well all functions for the hue lights work with HA, you will only need an account to update firmware through the app.
Thanks for the response, could you link the Zigbee device you recommend, and would this solution be PnP?
I’ve never used the Home Assistant branded Zigbee linked above, I use a Sonoff Zigbee stick for mine and it works well and is as plug and play as anything.
I can second the SONOFF dongle. When I was using a raspberry pi, I’ve also used a Zigbee shield ( ZB-Shield - popp.eu ) which is a very compact solution since it connects to the GPIO pins instead of sticking out from the USB ports. Both of these work with Philips Hue devices. The shield is not completely plug and play but the steps are outlined quite clearly in the product manual.
In HomeAssistant, you can use the ZHA integration, setting up the controller and coupling devices is pretty straightforward in my experience, as long as you know how to set your LED strips in pairing mode.
Majority of devices you just hold the power button for say 3 seconds and it should show up when you are in the add device page, others you may need to hold for a few sec then tap i.e in the case of some light switches that I seen in videos featuring them.
I have no experience with the Hue strips, but on bulbs it’s a little bizarre where when you give it power it will blink a couple of times indicating it’s in pairing mode and then it just shows up in the Zigbee new devices for configuration. I suppose I get it, these devices don’t have buttons and were never intended to be used outside of Hue’s proprietary hub so there was no need for some pairing process. It threw me a little when I was migrating away from the hub and to ZHA.
Yea soon as I had direct power to the lamps they were plugged into after I removed the smart plugs I was using before they went into pairing mode automatically for first time setup, when you want to move them to another setup you will just need to remove them from the current instance they are setup in then add them back in the case of doing fw updates through app.
The strip comes with a controller that you use to pair to your install once you power it on and have the strips plugged in.
I use LEDs and bulbs from a few different manufacturers (Philips, Innr, Ikea, Gledopto, MiBoxer/Tuya). Some need to press and hold for 3, 5 or 10 s, some need to be switched on and off quickly for 4 or 6 times. It’s different for each.