I have just ordered Yellow and am excited to join the Home Assistant community- hello, everyone!
I currently have a Hue bridge, an Ika Bridge and some Nano leaf lights. I am looking to slowly replace all of them with something that works seamlessly with HA and doesn’t need any additional bridges.
Lets strat with light bulbs and switches- I have a combo of GU10 and standard lightbulb sockets (E27?)- what would be the best light bulbs and switches to buy if you were starting with HA today?
Considering Yellow has Matter, I would ideally like to think forward instead of Zigbee-based older products.
Hue lights work with Home Assistant directly through Zigbee without the hub, you just unpair them from the hue bridge and apps then put them into pairing mode and use the ZHA or zigbee2mqtt integrations to add them to HA.
I have 3 bulbs and one led strip in my setup at this time connected through my skyconnect via ZHA (the yellow comes with one already slotted internally for the zigbee and matter support out of the box).
Your nanoleaf lights would be able to connect to HA through thread.
Don’t just focus on matter as the sole protocol to start with you want to use what is available to you at the current time, the advantage of HA is that its modular so that you can combine multiple options to fit your needs at the time based on what is on the market in your region.
For me the only matter bridge I have at this time is the switchbot hub 2 as I had issues with some usb bluetooth adapters for my swithbot bots and the only direct matter device I am using is the aquara p2 door sensor.
My issue with Hue is that I think I went overboard with the number of lights so the Hue bridge doesn’t even see 15 or so lights that were already paired with it. I’ll have to figure out a way to reset that.
About the only thing I’m unsure of is the Hue LED strip behind my TV that syncs with an additional Hue box to change lights based on HDMI signal and colours. I don’t think I can remove that box but I wonder if that box can directly be connected to HA.
For those specific ones you can keep them on the box and see if it shows up in the dedicated intergration when you set it up and migrate the rest to work from HA directly instead:
Also whilst on the topic of hue lights I suggest this integration to use with them (good for other similar bulbs and lamps that have the option especially with an alarm setup for a more natural way to wake up and automate light temperature and level based on time at night):