Hi everyone. I recently started with Home Assistant so my knowledge right now is not very deep. Still learning about all the capabilities. Also fascinated.
However, I already used the Smart Home System from Philips Hue with the Hue Bridge and around 20 Bulbs, LED Strips and Light Bars. All connected via Zigbee with the Hue Bridge. It worked well, and I’ve never experienced any problems. Also, very snappy in terms of automation.
I wanted to go a step further and integrate my lights into Home Assistant with a Matter pairing code from the Hue App because that’s the new standard right? It worked very well. And all lights are perfectly controllable.
Now I did a few automations like for example a light-alarm that turns on and off all lights in my apartment in a specified interval. I sadly noticed that the latency is pretty bad. The lights turn on but not all at once and at the same exact time. Some are quicker and some are slower in response, which results in an uneven light-pulse-distribution through my apartment.
I know the Matter Integration is still in Beta but I’ve wondered if this is due to the fact that the Matter Integration is in Beta or if it’s something else. Would it be better if I added my lights via the Philips Hue integration?
Thanks for every advice <3
[PROBLEM SOLVED]
Thanks to @mocelet I’ve managed to eliminate the “Popcorn” effect in my System. I’ve put all Lights in the Hue App in a Zone. The Zone then immediately showed up as Entity in HA. It’s pretty much as responsive as if I would trigger the lights over the Hue App.
I wanted to mark his answer as solution, but I don’t have or see the checkbox to do so. That’s why I made this addition here to my initial post.
That would be a step backwards, the official Hue integration is better at the moment since it exposes all the Hue-specific features.
While Matter has evolved a lot in Matter 1.3 with features like scenes management or command batching to reduce the popcorn effect, the Hue bridge does not support them (they’re still in Matter 1.0 IIRC).
Simple is usually better, so putting matter between HA and the HUE bridge just adds another piece of stuff to deal with. Even if the extra stuff is working perfectly it’s going to add additional latency. And as you noted it’s not working well.
I’ve disabled the Matter integration now and set up the Philips Hue integration. I’ve made a Helper Entity which Groups all lights together for more convenience.
Then I built a Test Automation to check if the light pulse is more responsive. Sadly, there isn’t any noticeable improvement… I think it’s even worse now. Lights are completely uncoordinated, and some lights don’t even get the trigger to turn on or off. I even placed the Hue Bridge closer to my HA but no luck.
What’s strange is when I toggle all lights on or off over the Hue App it works perfectly and is super responsive. All lights go on and off at the exact same time.
The popcorn effect can only be avoided when you use native Hue groups and scenes. That should be possible with Matter 1.3 but the Hue bridge is on 1.0 anyway.
With native groups or scenes, instead of sending commands one by one for each light it’s a groupcast of just one command that arrives to all the lights at the same time.
Follow the indications of the official docs to use Hue groups and Hue scenes instead of Home Assistant groups or scenes: Philips Hue - Home Assistant That’s going to be the best way to control multiple lights at once, at least until Matter 1.3 features are implemented.
