Help with Dealing with Philips Hue Bulbs with the same name

Configuration
1

I’ve played with this for a couple of days and can’t seem to find a solution.

I have everything working fine except for bulbs that have the same name like:
Tall Lamp
Small Lamp

In HA, these are detected as
light.tall_lamp
light.tall_lamp_1
light.tall_lamp_2
light.small_lamp
light.small_lamp_1
light.small_lamp_2
etc

The problem is the order changes after each restart of HA. This makes it impossible to assign to groups.
This is no good.
If they were assigned the same name every time, there would be no issue and honestly, I was shocked to figure out they were not.

Is there a way to force HA to bind the dynamic names’ number "light.lampname_#’ to the uniqueid (aka the MAC Address) of each specific bulb?
The Hue API returns the uniqueid when you query the ip.address/api//lights.
{“1”:{“state”:{“on”:false,“bri”:145,“ct”:443,“alert”:“none”,“colormode”:“ct”,“reachable”:true},“type”:“Color temperature light”,“name”:“Tall Lamp”,“modelid”:“LTW004”,“manufacturername”:“Philips”,“uniqueid”:“00:11:22:33:44:55:66:77-0b”,“swversion”:“5.50.1.19085”}

Am I missing something simple or perhaps undocumented in the Hue setup for HA?
This seems like a basic feature, but yet I just can’t find it.

And before the suggestions “Make all your lights a different name”, yeah, that won’t work for us at all. :frowning:

So, any suggestions aside from never rebooting my HA box (hahahaha :laughing:) or re-configuring it every single time I do?

Thanks in advance!
cheers!!
J

2

Are you using Wink and Phillips Hue support (like I am) or emulated and physical hue hubs? If so, that’s why.

You can try using the entity_namespace: option; that’s what I do with media players to differentiate Plex and Cast entities in my set up because I have devices that do both like a ShieldTV.

3

@rpitera
Unfortunately, I am using only the Philips Hue bridge and Hue bulbs.
I can see how this can be useful for mix and matching, but doesn’t do it for my singular situation.
Thanks for pointing this out though. I am sure it will come handy in the future. :slight_smile:

cheers!
J

1 Like
4

Weird if you’re just using an physical hub. There is an option in the Hue app to clean the hub of outdated references and scenes; you may want to try that.