Emulated Hue and Hubitat

Geoff_T · October 13, 2019, 12:27pm

Has anyone been able to add an Emulated Hue from HA into Hubitat?

My emulated Hue on HA is found fine by my Harmony Hub so I presume I have it set up OK, but it is not found in Hubitat. I can post a similar question on the Hubitat forum, but as a standard Hue is found OK on there, I guess they won’t consider it their issue. I have tried on both port 8300 and 80 with no success. Any suggestions as to anything I can change to try? I’m running HA on Hassio on a PI 3B using the inbuilt Emulated Hue integration.

Out of interest I have got the description.xml for both my emulated hue and genuine hue to see if there was any clues in there. There are differences, but the basic info seems to be there OK.

Physical Hue ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<root xmlns="urn:schemas-upnp-org:device-1-0">
<specVersion>
<major>1</major>
<minor>0</minor>
</specVersion>
<URLBase>http://192.168.1.67:80/</URLBase>
<device>
<deviceType>urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:Basic:1</deviceType>
<friendlyName>Philips hue (192.168.1.67)</friendlyName>
<manufacturer>Signify</manufacturer>
<manufacturerURL>http://www.meethue.com</manufacturerURL>
<modelDescription>Philips hue Personal Wireless Lighting</modelDescription>
<modelName>Philips hue bridge 2015</modelName>
<modelNumber>BSB002</modelNumber>
<modelURL>http://www.meethue.com</modelURL>
<serialNumber>001788b0c887</serialNumber>
<UDN>uuid:2f402f80-da50-11e1-9b23-001788b0c887</UDN>
<presentationURL>index.html</presentationURL>
<iconList>
<icon>
<mimetype>image/png</mimetype>
<height>48</height>
<width>48</width>
<depth>24</depth>
<url>hue_logo_0.png</url>
</icon>
</iconList>
</device>
</root>

Emulated Hue -------------------------------------------------------------

<root xmlns="urn:schemas-upnp-org:device-1-0">
<specVersion>
<major>1</major>
<minor>0</minor>
</specVersion>
<URLBase>http://192.168.1.88:80/</URLBase>
<device>
<deviceType>urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:Basic:1</deviceType>
<friendlyName>HASS Bridge (192.168.1.88)</friendlyName>
<manufacturer>Royal Philips Electronics</manufacturer>
<manufacturerURL>http://www.philips.com</manufacturerURL>
<modelDescription>Philips hue Personal Wireless Lighting</modelDescription>
<modelName>Philips hue bridge 2015</modelName>
<modelNumber>BSB002</modelNumber>
<modelURL>http://www.meethue.com</modelURL>
<serialNumber>1234</serialNumber>
<UDN>uuid:2f402f80-da50-11e1-9b23-001788255acc</UDN>
</device>
</root>

Burningstone · October 13, 2019, 1:10pm

Why do you use Hubitat and Home assistant?
And why don’t you connect the physical hue to hubitat, why do you need the emulated hue?

Geoff_T · October 13, 2019, 1:41pm

I do love it when people answer forum questions with “why would you want to do that?” Does it matter why?

But if you must know:

I have got a physical Hue connected to Hubitat where all of my Zwave, Zigbee devices and rules currently are too.

I have only just started with HA and am just exploring various possibilities for it. At the moment I am using the emulated hue on HA mainly to interface with my Harmony remote home control buttons using virtual lights. This gives more flexibility than controlling Hue lights directly from Harmony, (such as being able to toggle lights with a single press rather than single press for on, long for off which my wife hates). I figured if I can get the emulated Hue to connect to Hubitat also, I could use it as a rudimentary interface between Hubitat and HA.

Burningstone · October 13, 2019, 1:52pm

Yes it matters in this case.

I didn’t know Hubitat before, but I read about it now and from what I understand it is basically a commercial version of HA. I would either use one or the other.

What do you want to achieve with the interface between Hubitat and HA? There might be better solutions to achieve what you want. Is this Hubitat box able to communicate over MQTT?

Burningstone · October 13, 2019, 2:01pm

I would post your issue on the Hubitat forum as well, because Harmony, Alexa, Google Home etc. all recognize emulated Hue but Hubitat doesn’t so it seems like the problem is on their side.

Geoff_T · October 13, 2019, 2:25pm

No, not yet. There is something in alpha testing but nothing released.

Intitially, it would open up all of my Hubitat devices to be controlled from the Harmony home control buttons using HA as a go between.

I see HA as maybe the “telephone exchange” of a future system, with my Zwave and Zigbee devices still on my Hubitat, other LAN devices connected to HA and HA or Node Red etc running the rules. But this is baby steps for me at the moment, I’m just seeing what’s possible. I had a Raspberry PI anyway and kept reading about HA and Node Red, so thought I’d see what it was all about.

Yes, I will. But I guess their response will be that it works with the physical Hue which is all it was designed to do. Their support is excellent, but it might be a stretch to get them to investigate this.

Burningstone · October 13, 2019, 2:34pm

For me it looks like HA can do everything than Hubitat can do and more
My suggestion: Go all in with Home Assistant!
Of course step by step, first replacing the current functionality of your Hubitat and then expanding to other stuff.

Can you tell me what you are currently doing with Hubitat? What are the exact Z-Wave and ZigBee devices you control with Hubitat? Do you control other things as well with Hubitat?

Does Hubitat support connecting to multiple Hue hubs? Could be that it can only connect to one hub.

Geoff_T · October 13, 2019, 2:56pm

That is a big task. I have around 50 Zigbee devices and 20 Zwave devices, on top of my 40 odd Hue bulbs on the Hue bridge. Then there are more than 80 rules, 5 dashboards etc. Hubitat controls pretty much all of my lights and my heating.

I am happy with Hubitat, especially for Zigbee and Zwave, but I do think that HA is going to be better at connecting to LAN devices. As for Hubitat v HA for Rule/Automations I would say Hubitat is way more user friendly, but that HA is more powerful once you get the damn syntax right! I love being able to copy/paste/edit automations in HA which you can’t directly do in Hubitat. I have loaded Node Red but haven’t had a chance to have a play yet.

So as I said, I don’t see me ditching Hubitat, but I can see me integrating it into a more HA centred system in the future once the MQTT link is available. I have started by moving over my Harmony hub control rules from Hubitat to HA as they were pretty much isolated from other stuff. That seems to have worked OK and was a good learning process.

Yes. I checked that. You can have multiple instances of the Hue integration and have different hubs on each one.

Burningstone · October 13, 2019, 3:06pm

Home Assistant could do all of this easily, so I don’t see any reason to use both. I even think it makes the whole thing more complicated then it needs to be. But to each his own.

I just found a thread about connecting home assistant and Hubita

And also a thread on the Hubitat forum:

Burningstone · October 14, 2019, 2:54pm

I don’t dislike Hubitat, I just don’t think it is a good idea to have automations in both systems. So either expose Hubitat entities to HA or vice versa and then do all the automations in one system. I don’t know if Hubitat can handle this, HA can do this for sure.

The HA community is open and I didn’t see anyone dismissing Hubitat, however this is an open source product and not a commercial solution, so if there is no developer who is interested in developing this, it will not happen. And due to the demand for this not being really high from what I’ve seen, the core developer team will also not take this into consideration due to higher priorities. In addition HA already exposes its devices to other systems via e.g. MQTT or REST API, Hubitat should open up for this and be able to discover these exposed devices in their system Same goes for the emulated Hue, as I stated above Google Home, Alexa, Harmony, etc. are all able to see emulated Hue but Hubitat doesn’t, so the problem is on Hubitat’s side

I think this MQTT solution from my thread above is a step into the right direction and I would follow this if you want to connect HA and Hubitat.

Burningstone · October 14, 2019, 3:01pm

If you are able to somehow expose the devices connected to Hubitat to HA, you could keep your Hubitat hub but move the rules over to HA. You can then also move the rules step-by-step to make the big task into a few smaller tasks I would suggest following the MQTT application thread I posted and discuss with the developer of this app.

Geoff_T · October 14, 2019, 3:05pm

I’ve just signed up for the alpha4 testing of this and as of a few hours ago have a handful of my Hubitat devices linked to HA via MQTT

If it proves reliable it’s the way to go for me.

Burningstone · October 14, 2019, 3:08pm

Sounds promising! Best of luck In case you need some help on the HA side, let me know, I might be able to help.

ptdalen · October 14, 2019, 9:09pm

I went from smarthings to Hubitat and then ended up with HA. I had a similar amount of zwave, zigbee and hue devices. I started slowly moving over simple automations one at a time and then eventually the more complex ones as I learned more. I’ve been all HA for about a year now and could not imagine moving back. But I agree smart things/hubitat are easier for a basic user. But they’ve really made some pretty significant updates in the last few versions the make things even easier in HA.