After finally giving up on finding the benefits of a raspee gateway between all the hassle it caused me, some days ago I moved all but one of my Tradfri lights from a Tradfri to a Hue gateway to join some Hue bulbs that came with the new gateway.
Frankly, the Hue gateway and the existing software ecosystem instantly caused much of the relief that I never got from the Tradfri products and failed to get from the raspbee GW.
Anyways… Now the Tradfri gateway is happily serving one single color bulb in a night light for my kids and that’s only because of the included hardware remote which is able to control the brightness and color of the bulb, but only if paired with a Tradfri gateway. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to pair a Tradfri remote to a Hue GW while retaining the color loop function of the remote.
I failed to find a reasonable priced Hue remote, that can control both brightness and color of a Tradfri or Hue bulb. In fact, Signify seems to sell it’s LivingColor remotes only together with lights and not separately.
Do you know of any remotes that can be paired to a Hue gateway and to a bulb without kicking the bulb from the network? If yes, are these remotes able to perform smooth color transitions? I know of a Paulmann remote which indeed seems to be able to control colors, but only in rough steps, not nearly as smooth and instantly as with the Hue app.
Are there any DIY (esp powered?) remotes out there that I could use to control the bulb together with Home Assistant and/or mqtt
battery operated and with a reasonable battery life?
What you want to do is not possible with the Hue Gateway. The light color control for the Tradfri remotes is built into the Tradfri gateway, Hue can’t replicate this behaviour. What you can do is adding any other remote directly to home assistant and control it from there. However you will not get the smooth transition of colors and brightness easily if at all. For this you need deconz, ZHA or ZigBee2MQTT together with thsi awesome app
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Maybe what I wrote yesterday was a bit misunderstanding. I have no hard requirement to either use the Tradfri bulb or the Tradfri remote anymore. I’d happily switch to a spare Hue bulb I’ve already laying around together with a Hue compatible remote, if both components are at least working together in an existing zigbee network.
My preferred setup would be:
- The bulb can be registered in the existing Hue zigbee network, i.e. can be controlled with a Hue compatible app and the HA Hue integration
- The bulb can be controlled with a physical remote. This doesn’t necessarily mean, that it has to be a zigbee remote at all. But if it is one, it shouldn’t kick the bulb from the Hue network (i.e. not pulling the bulb into a private zigbee network)
- The remote is able to change the color and the brightness of the bulb. While the remote should be able to set more than only six or eight base colors, I don’t insist on the remote being able to select all 16.9 Million colors, which the bulb is able to produce allegedly.
Having smooth transitions between them would be nice, but are no strict requirement.
If this isn’t possible with zigbee components I could also switch to a wifi controlled bulb for this particular use case. But I’d rather get this working with the Hue bulb because of it’s good color rendering, wide brightness range and rather low standby energy consumption compared to wifi bulbs.
You can do this with the Tradfri remote as well, but you need to write the automations for the remote to call the necessary services yourself, with this I mean that you can’t connect a remote to your existing network and it will provide the functionality (when you connect a Tradfri bulb to a Tradfri remote in the Tradfri gateway, the behaviour is automatically generated).
If you don’t want to switch to DeCONZ, ZHA or ZigBee2MQTT and rather keep the Hue integration. I’ll advise you to not use a ZigBee remote, because Home Assistant is polling the state from the Hue Hub at a specified interval (where as the others I mentioned push changes to Home Assistant), which can lead to missed events.
I already went down the road writing my own automations for the Tradfri remote using more or less the same “spaghetti automation” approach as xaviml but couldn’t finish it because of an unresolved bug in deConz.
It’s kind of funny that all of my problems with the smart bulbs in my house seem to revolve around proper dimming of these things. 
Not being able to write proper dimming automations for the Tradfri bulbs were the exact reason I tried to switch from Tradfri to deConz in the first place. Because of the Tradfri HA integration reporting wrong brightness values for Trafdri lights.
But because of a similar bug in deConz (not reporting correct color temp attributes for w/ww lights) I couldn’t get my dimming automations flying with deConz either. 
Now I’m trying the same with the Hue gateway and I’m really curious if I’ll get my automations finally working or if there is yet another bug getting in my way I’m not aware of right now. Wish me luck! 