Faking Hue Bridge with HA and zigbee?

Configuration Zigbee
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1

I have hassio installed on a raspberry pi with a zigbee chip (raspbee).

I thought, that with HA, I can actually simulate a hue bridge or that I wouldn’t need one. If yes, how can I do that?

I don’t have any philips products, but I have innr bulbs and plugs. The plugs have a special function, where they record energy usage. I am guessing, that I won’t be able to read that without the native innr app, even If I manage to turn them on and off without the app.

Now, the app itself won’t work unless it connects to hue bridge or innr bridge.

So I was thinking, that I should somehow be able to have my pi be that bridge. Or did I totally misunderstand the point of HA?

I found some components, relevant to Hue, like /hue/ and /emulated_hue/, but I am not sure, that this is what I am looking for.

I also read, that in order to simulate a hue bridge I need zigbee2mqtt, which I have no idea, what it even is.

Where should I start with this task?

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Emulated hue makes home assistant emulate a gen 1 hue bridge.

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@petro But it says “this virtual bridge will not replace a physical bridge”.

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You are correct, it does not. It just emulates a hue bridge. I use it to interface with my harmony remote and alexa. Both alexa and harmony ‘think’ that I have a hue bridge.

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So in your case it does replace a physical bridge? Or would it work with my zigbee gateway in order to be a bridge?

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Are you familiar with the term ‘emulate’? Home assistant with the emulated hue component emulates a hue bridge. Meaning the actual bridge does not exist, but home assistant is pretending to be said bridge. Devices that interface with emulated hue think that they are talking to an actual hue bridge that does not exist. Home assistant is actually handling all the logic and bridge functions.

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@petro that’s what I thought too. It acts as the bridge, basically being a bridge. But in the docs of the component it says, I still need a physical bridge. For what?

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I think you’re skimming the documentation too much. Those notes are warnings for people who actually have hue light bulbs.

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OK, so this component, simply speaking, can pretend to be a bridge over wifi, but can not over zigbee, so it cannot actually control hue lights, but it can pretend to be a bridge for alexa, google home and maybe the native app I want to setup?

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Correct. But home assistant has ways of controlling your zigbee if you have a zigbee stick or chip in your pi.

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It can control zigbee, but it can’t control hue products, because they don’t use standard zigbee right? Or is there a component for that?

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Hue products DO use the zigbee standard and the HA ZHA component can control them just fine without a Hue Hub. https://www.home-assistant.io/components/zha/

Your Innr bulbs will also work with the ZHA component

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Thx, I didn’t know I needed to install ZHA in order to have zigbee working. Guess that explains why HA isn’t seeing any devices.

Do you happen to know how to proceed in the case of a chip added to the pins directly, rather than a stick one? Like what do I write in usb path for example?

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Use the search function of the forum and you’ll find this;

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15

Well so far I was able to get deconz working and I have added some plugs and a light successfully and I can control them via HA yay

What I wasn’t able to achieve is having the native app recognize emulated hue as a hue bridge. Not sure if this is possible though, since it is not alexa or google home.

The Hue App found a bridge, but it says to press the button on the bridge, in order to connect. Not sure how this is supposed to work or if it can work at all like this?

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Any luck user9920? I’m replacing a z-wave stick with a combo z-wave and zigbee stick soon and I would like to get rid of the hue hub if possible. My wrench in the plan is we are an iOS household and everything runs through HomeKit. My z-wave lights show up in HomeKit so I don’t see why the Hue wouldn’t if I remove the hub and use the zigbee stick but those z-wave lights are just switches, on, off, not color like the Hue bulbs.

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I got the bulbs to work fine with my zigbee stick and hass.io. Everything works, all censors etc. However, I was not able to fake the bridge and use the native app. But now I don’t need to anyway.

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Thanks for the response. I can’t remember the last time I used the native app, being an iOS household we just use HomeKit. I’m going to give it a try.

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Thanks for the simple, educated, explanatory reply. I was wading through hints, clues and vague responses.