I have been thinking of switching from Hubitat to Home Assistant off and on for some time now. And with HA’s reputation for supporting a wide array of devices I wasn’t worried about my stuff working just fine with it. But, just for fun I checked (on the Integrations page) for Osram as most of my lights bulbs are Osram tunable white. And it it seem to say that a bridge is required:
“host string REQUIRED
IP address of the Osram Lightify bridge, e.g., 192.168.1.50.”
Please tell me that it isn’t true, or I just misunderstand what I’m reading. This sure seems to suggest pretty strongly to me that I have to have one. Is this correct?
Thanks,
Jon
PS: Shouldn’t there be a home automation company named Brooklyn that has a bridge for their equipment that’s really popular so that then everybody is buying a Brooklyn Bridge? Just wondering :-).
Not sure what exact bulbs you have. There is osram bulbs mentioned as zigbee all over this forum. I am sure someone has some details on what you may need. If they are zigbee, then zha or zigbee2mqtt may be a place to start. A coordinator would be required to get the protocol though.
They are zigbee, “LIGHTIFY A19 Tunable White”. But I think the problem here is my understanding of what I’m seeing in the Integrations pages on Home Assistant’s website.
I think (still not sure) what I was seeing was requirements for connecting a bridge to HA if you have one. But not a requirement to have one. So in the case of Osram I could connect a hub if I wanted, and in that case the IP address would certainly be necessary, but I don’t have to have one to use the bulbs since they are standard zigbee.
So, I just need to read a little more before I jump to conclusions. I’m sure that from now on there will be no more errors, mistakes, or panicing, as I get farther into switching over to HA.
If the bulbs are Zigbee you need some sort of coordinator, you cannot connect the bulbs to Home Assistant without one.
The Osram hub would act as a coordinator. I would recommend using another coordinator though and run Z2M or ZHA. The Osram hub would probably be picky on what you can pair to it, Z2M and ZHA are not. In the latter you can add “everything” (see supported devices pages on both) not being limited by what the Osram hub supports.
The integration you are seeing is for when you have a Osram hub you want to integrate to HA. Then you would add the ip of the hub to the integration, and HA would “talk” to your bulbs through that hub.
OK, I’m starting to get more of a picture here. When using systems like Smartthings or Hubitat a lot of this is hidden, that is I would guess that there must be a coordinator in there someplace they just don’t choose to expose that to the end user.
I did read about ZHA recently but Z2M is new, although I have heard of MQTT before. As to a ‘coordinator’, I didn’t even know that it was, and it’s not in the HA Glossary. After more searching my best guess is that’s the firmware running on (for example) a Zigbee USB stick that takes care of the network.
Well, I decided to jump into HA without knowing the basics, so I have a steep learning curve ahead of me. Just to make sure I’m not missing something basic, so if I do have a supported USB Zigbee ‘stick’ (coordinator/radio) then I would not need any other bridge for zigbee devices. Unless that device manufacturer is has some non-standard stuff going on, which in that case wouldn’t really be Zigbee anyway (Having said that I will say I’ve read how lots of manufacturers are pretty flexible on how they do things when making Zigbee devices, and I may need Z2M to support some of those, but I’m just trying to stick to the basics here).
I wasn’t even sure (they seem to have a somewhat spotty reputation), although I’ve heard they do not. But, I just checked a feature in Hubitat that shows a graphical representation of my zigbee network and found 1 bulb working as a repeater. Out of 12. My Ikea lights (of which I have maybe 6 bulbs total) had several repeaters shown.
Well, in the vain of not understanding, I didn’t even look for that at first, thinking I had to look up each brand/manufacturer to see if their devices work since that is what I do with my current hub.
As a reference, and to serve as a data / a sampling point:
I have this specific Osram / Sylvania bulb, model # 73693, and it is a zigbee bulb, which would also act as zigbee repeaters (aka zigbee routers), which would help extend my zigbee mesh network.
For the radio hardware of the zigbee controller (aka zigbee coordinator), I am using a Sonoff USB 3.0 ZBDongle-P to serve the zigbee radio via USB 2.0 (and via a USB extension cord).
And then, for the software side of the zigbee controller, I am using zigbee2mqtt, which is available as an add-on to my HAOS install.
There are alternative USB (or even networked) sticks for #2 above, and also alternative SW control layer for #3.
But anyways, after the setup, it suddenly opens up wide applications under HA umbrella. I can tell the weather condition from the bulb when I am about to leave the house in the morning; I can get warning if the garage door stays open over x minutes; I can obviously open/close the light based on time of the day, and even match the brightness of the light based on sun conditions.
With all this talk about Zigbee controllers (not quite the original topic, but close enough I think), I took the plunge and ordered HA Yellow which comes with the latest version of a Zigbee controller chip, EFR32MG21, and reportedly is still considered a work-in-progress for Z2M use. Does anyone here know just how much of an issue it might be?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that ZHA is what HA natively supports, Z2M is (I think) an add-on. I’ve read Z2M may get more functionality from some devices, but at this point I don’t know if I’ll need it. And with the Zigbee/Thread integration that’s being worked on (or maybe completed) for this controller it may just be simpler to buy a 2nd controller for Z2M.
