HA with Hue Hub

Configuration
1

Hi All,

Been dabbling with HA for a few weeks now and for the most part have things working as expected, however I have a niggling issue with scenes.

Now my understanding of the creation of a scene is to set the bulb(s) as you desire and then create the scene by adding the required bulb(s) and saving the scene.

My issue is whenever I run that scene manually or from an automation the colour is never correct although I did find if I kept running the scene it eventually got to the colour I wanted.

In my testing I’ve been focused on turning an Innr bulb joined to the Hue Hub to Blue with a brightness of 1%.

The following is what has been saved within scenes.yaml

- id: '1602924293397'
  name: Blake Night Blue
  entities:
    light.blake_s_light:
      min_mireds: 153
      max_mireds: 500
      effect_list:
      - colorloop
      - random
      brightness: 5
      hs_color:
      - 218.353
      - 100
      rgb_color:
      - 0
      - 91
      - 255
      xy_color:
      - 0.138
      - 0.091
      effect: none
      friendly_name: Blake's Light
      supported_features: 63
      state: 'on'

If anyone is able to point me in the right direction I’d be most grateful.

Nick

2

So the only things you would want to define in this scene are state, brightness or brightness_pct and one of hs_color, rgb_color, and xy_color. Remove everything else.

hs_color, rgb_color, and xy_color are three different ways of setting the color, so you should only use one.

3

Many thanks for this.

So I made the edit and have the following:

- id: '1602924293397'
  name: Blake Night Blue
  entities:
    light.blake_s_light:
      min_mireds: 153
      max_mireds: 500
      effect_list:
      - colorloop
      - random
      brightness: 5
      rgb_color:
      - 0
      - 0
      - 139
      effect: none
      friendly_name: Blake's Light
      supported_features: 63
      state: 'on'

My understanding is that the RGB code for dark blue is as above, in doing this its still hit and miss as to the colour being set correctly.

In one scenario the light is set to bright daylight white and all that’ll happen is the light will remain white albeit dimmed.

Another scenario would be where the light is set to a more natural warm colour and when running the scene it works as expected.

I originally created the scene via the GUI so is the a downside to doing it that way?

EDIT: Do I have to remove everything else like “effect_list:” and the min and max values?

4

Think you missed that part :stuck_out_tongue: I don’t think that would actually affect things, but I also don’t use scenes (I just use scripts).

On another note, you might be better off defining scenes with the Hue app and calling them with a hue.hue_activate_scene service call. The Hue app makes it easy to create Hue scenes.

5

You’re right I did miss it!

I have considered utilising the hue scenes as I’ve some already setup as I’ve had Hue for a little while.

I am about to flash a Sonoff zigbee bridge for use with HA and will add a bulb or two to that to see how things work.

With the Hue hub I have some Innr bulbs added and while they work when they’re in a group of say 8 lights which I have in the kitchen they don’t always respond so 6 will dim and the other 2 won’t so you have to wait for a bit for Hue to realise the change didn’t happen then run a scene again.

I will test a few other scenes and let you know how they go.

Many thanks for your assistance.

6

The use of a ZigBee group (a.k.a. Hue group) might correct the problem you described (“6 will dim and the other 2 won’t”).

When Home Assistant activates a scene or group, it sends separate commands to each member of the scene/group. For your 8 lights, that’s 8 separate streams of communications. That’s a fair bit of traffic and you may get ‘popcorn effect’ (lights turn on in sequence as opposed to simultaneously) or (worst case) some may fail to receive the command.

If you create a ZigBee/hue group, only one command is needed to activate (or deactivate) it. In other words, a single command is broadcasted and all 8 lights receive it simultaneously. The ‘popcorn effect’ is far less likely to occur and there’s a better chance of all lights receiving the command (i.e. far less network traffic).

7

The issue I have with a number of lights was before using HA.

So within the Hue app if I run a scene say “concentrate” sometimes only some of the bulbs respond.
These are Innr GU10 bulbs and I find the same thing happens with Innr candle lights that I have in the hallway and on the landing.

Hue bulbs never miss a beat and always respond first time.

I do want to see how these Innr bulbs perform when connecting to a Zigbee bridge direct into HA, if they work better I will then need to create/run scenes only in HA.

I would also then look at how well the Hue bulbs and switches work on the Zigbee bridge.