I bought a OSRAM switch mini (Amazon Link ), and after some hassle I managed to link it to my hue bridge. This means, as per the FAQ of the OSRAM website (see 5.3), it now controls all devices connected to my hue bridge (that being two lights and a smart plug). Since it’s a third party switch, not included in “friends of hue”, it doesn’t show up in my hue app or the hue essentials app.
I was hoping I could use my Home Assistant to reconfigure the remote by intercepting the events it sends, however when I listen to hue_events in the developer tools, no events show up when pressing the remotes, despite my lights turning on/off etc. Am I listening to the correct event type, or would I be able to find these events elsewhere? I’d think at least some event would be send via my hue bridge considering the lights are controlled.
I did find a blueprint for the remote, however it does not include a hue integration connection (and I don’t have any of the other integrations set up in my home yet, my hue bridge is my only Zigbee device). I tried brute forcing the blueprint to work, however that didn’t work out, I think because the hue bridge works on a ZLL protocol instead of the asume ZHA -or similar- protocol from the blueprint?
Anyway, if someone has an idea on how to intercept (or succesfully listen) to the events from the switch, that would be greatly appreciated.
Philips Hue Bridge only presents a Philips Hue API to the Philips Hue integration so Home Assistant does not know that the Philips Hue uses Zigbee at all. Philips Hue API abstracts away all Zigbee stuff so it could technically be using any wireless technology and protocols without Home Assistant knowing the difference.
Off-topic but recommend buy a Zigbee USB adapter and install either ZHA integration or Zigbee2MQTT.
They have different pros and cons, ZHA is natively integrated into Home Assistant, while Zigbee2MQTT convert Zigbee to MQTT and works as a external stand-alone gateway (similar to Philips Hue Bridge).
Note that you can use several different Zigbee solutions at the same time but they will each need their own dedicated Zigbee adapter/gateway/bridge and every solution will only set up a single Zigbee network and it is not possible to connect different Zigbee networks so they will not be aware of the others in any way.
Personally recommend buy a few of these because can also reflash to use as Zigbee Router (repeater):
Zigbee signals are weak so reply on a strong Zigbee network mesh (meaning many Zigbee Router devices) and are very sensitive to RMF/EMI/RMI interference so it makes it much easier to troubleshoot and find the real root cause if have already optimized your setup and environment to work around that. In practice fact that device is Zigbee only matters if you would instead using ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT.
Before buy and setup/install recommend also reading tips as really apply to all to all Zigbee solutions:
Thanks for your clear and extensive answer! I was afraid this would be the case, but I wasn’t aware this was how the Hue API worked.
I had already been looking into some of these, as they seem quite interesting, cheap, and like a fun project to look into. However the one thing I couldn’t figure out (I don’t know if you happen to know the answer either) is if it is required to have these devices plugged into the pi or a pc for example. I’m running HA core on a virtual Linux machine on an old android phone currently, and although I’ll probably switch to a pi eventually, but for the moment I can’t. So if it is possible to use those USB sticks if they’re simply plugged into a usb power outlet, not necessarily in any pc or something, they’d be the perfect solution!
Zigbee Coordinator adapter are presented as a standard serial port so need somehow connect that serial communcation to either the ZHA integration inside Home Assistant or Zigbee2MQTT, (with Zigbee2MQTT again being a stand-alone Zigbee gateway application working like an exteral hub).
Zigbee Coordinator USB adapter obviously require a USB-interface, so the norm is to direct- attach it directly via a long USB extension cable to a computer to its OS or pass-though it to a virtual machine.
While not primarily recommended as a more expensive solution you can as an alternative to direct- attach via USB instead make or buy a network-attached Zigbee Coordinator adapter which uses a “ser2net” style serial stream server can tunnel the serial communication over TCP via “socat”. See example:
Note however that the serial protocol that Zigbee Coordinator adapters use is not designed to be robust or fault-tolerant as they expect a direct-attached connection, this is a bad idea to try to tunnel such serial communication over Wi-Fi, but over a wired Ethernet LAN is usually stable enough.
However, long-term it should better to run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or similar computer with a direct-attached Zigbee Coordinator USB adapter as that will be the most stable option. See example: