Custom Hue Entertainment experience

Hardware
1

Hey,

my current project is to host my own emulated hue bridge in order to use my Hue bulbs with Hue Entertainment programs like Hue Sync or with my Ambilight tv.
However, I struggle to find a reliable solution.

First about my setup:
I mainly use Philips Hue E27 and a few other Hue lights. But since I also own a few other ZigBee sensors, I decided to go with the ConBee II (after the CC2531 seemed to slow for my big network).
As ZigBee client, I use deConz. But I think ConBee II support for zigbee2mqtt is in the works?

So far, I found three possibilities:

  1. Original Hue Bridge. That is my last-resort solution as I am planning to include 2 WS2812B strips into my set up as soon as it works. If it works.
  2. Emulated Hue Hass.io Addon which seems to be no longer maintained and I lack Python experience. This addon does work with Hue Sync (Hue Entertainment) with only a short delay. But it creates a lot of flickering when using with Ambilight. It seems like it misses transitions or overwrites them. One color changes to another and back and to the next. Which is simply annoying when watching tv.
  3. diyHue. Hue Entertainment works, but only with a 5-10 second delay, which is not really usable with Ambilight. However, Ambilight does not work at all for me. The lights stay white and do not change the color after being paired with the tv.

Has anyone experience with this topic and found a reliable solution?

2

Hi,
I have the same issues. How did u manage to connect the ws2812b to the hassio hue addon?

3

It worked out of the box, I think (?)

4

If you want to use Hue Entertainment, the only convenient way to do so is to use the Hue Bridge. I think it is the only reliable and performant solution. However I want to share my experience:

Before there was Hue entertainment I used a smartphone app that used the camera to film my TV screen and then created a fitting light with my Hue bulbs. That was very immersive!

When Hue entertainment launched, I tested it right away as I thought if that cheap crappy camera solution is so great what can they do with native support. Well…they can fail. Hue entertainment is cool, but the crappy camera solution was just much better - even when it set all the bulbs to one color instead of having zones like Hue. The feeling of immersion was much higher than with Hue entertainment.

However it is quite a while ago since I tried it last - maybe they did some improvements since then. One of the most annoying things was that when the screen was black, they did not turn bulbs off but gave them a dimmed white…stupid. Don’t know if that is still the case…

Of course your situation is different if your TV has an Ambilight (mine not, its a Sony). In that case Hue entertainment might be a great addition. But for replacing missing ambilight…meh.

5

What firmware did u upload to the ws2812b contoller? The one from diyhue? Or something else?