New Phillips Hue Bulbs. No hub required - Bluetooth

Just saw this today, interesting. Wonder if it will enable a Bluetooth mesh throughout your home.

In the context of home assistant you would need at least a usb dongle so wouldn’t be without a hub regardless. Its great that they expand the features of the bulbs but it doesn’t really benefit this community yet

I have bluetooth in my hardware. I realize that not everyone does, but many do. I don’t know enough about bluetooth mesh, but I remember reading about someone who used multiple RPIs around the house using bluetooth to determine who what in what room. Would be pretty neat if a Hue Bulb in a room could accomplish the same thing.

Is there a possibility to implement these bluetooth bulbs without a bridge?

Yes, these bluetooth bulbs do not require the hue hub. I dont have any of these though, so I cannot say if they are any good or not.

I have one here to play with. I was wondering if it is possible to implement them in Home Assistent without the bridge…

I’d be curious to know as well. I really dont know much about adding bluetooth devices to HA. I’d say that is where you want to start. If you can add it as a bluetooth device, then I suspect you’d be able to control it. I’m fairly confident that you would not add a bluetooth hue bulb using the hue integration, as that expects the hub.

I’m very much interrested if I don’t need the hub for using hue bulbs together with my home assistant. I got a bluetooth adapter so that wouldn’t be an issue and my home assistant is in my living room which is where I would setup the hue bulbs.

To be honest, for me it’s the reason not to buy Philips hue bulbs anymore. Which I’m sad about because my whole house works with hue. But the fact that it has Bluetooth and you can’t disable it is bad. Bluetooth is not meshing so not ideal, it has not really good security so not ideal, it is another protocol that uses the already crowded 2.4ghz frequency band. So I rather have bulb with zigbee only.

Well, it’s a fact now that hue and also osram (sylvania) are making bluetooth smart bulbs that this should be slowly but surely implemented

Im waiting for my Conbee III stick to come in as I plan to migrate to zigbee, however did want to control one or two lights in the meantime. Interesting that no one bothers with the bluetooth conenction, guess that zigbee is superior.
I did find two github repo’s: https://github.com/npaun/philble and
https://github.com/walter5138/hue_ble_python which suggest that they can easily be controlled. Integrating in HA is another issue however…