TL;DR: How do I get Philips bulbs into pairing mode without using bridge, app or remote? Touchlink and hard reset don’t work either.
Hi, I’m completely new to Home Assistant and home automation in general.
All I want to do is set up a network of smart lights without having to use hue bridge or remote.
I have HA and ZHA installed on Raspberry Pi 4 B with a Sonoff ZBDongle-E 3.0.
I managed to setup an innr flex light, a Philips white and color ambiance E27 and a Phiips hue white GU10.
My issue: I have additional E27 and GU10 Philips bulbs from the same packages, which do not pair.
Maybe they were paired before, even though I bought them new. Now I’m trying to get them into pairing mode without having to buy and install a Philips bridge or remote control.
Apparently there’s a method called “touchlink”, however it’s suppsedly not working with Sonoff.
Another method was “hard reset” by turning the bulbs on and off 5x. I tried that repeatedly with both bulb models and with different instructions on timing but they never start blinking to indicate pairing mode and ZHA doesn’t find them no matter what I try.
Any ideas how I can reset the bulb and/or get them into pairing mode? It can’t be that difficult?
Any help would be appreciated.
By remote, do you mean the Hue dimmer switch (the one with “hue” on the bottom button)? That’s the only method I’ve been able to make work - put it next to the bulb and hold top and bottom buttons until the light flashes.
Depending on how many bulbs you’ve got left, it may be worth buying one.
Just remember it was exactly this manufacture spitting into the faces of their paying customers making a cloud account with data sharing obligatory after purchase.
I would rather get rid of all my devices from that brand than even spending 1 cent more on Signify/Phillips Hue Products.
I just got a remote (aka dimmer switch) from a neighbor and it worked instantly. I now managed to pair all devices. I’m glad I found an easy solution but as @indeeed was saying, I won’t be buying any more Philips products in the future.
Any other brands I should be avoiding if I want to spare me this hassle in the future?
Is innr alright? Or what brands are best for compatibility and price-performance?
The hard reset does work but can be very fidely. Make sure you count 5 seconds at least on the on state before turning back off. Then count 2 seconds, turn back on.
Do this 5 times finishing on the 5th on.
So:
On = 5 sec
Off = 2 sec
On = 5 sec
Off = 2 sec
On = 5 sec
Off = 2 sec
On = 5 sec
Off = 2 sec
Final On
If successful it will flash for about 5 seconds.
I would also count the seconds like real seconds… so slowly. One mississippi…etc.
Ive done it many times now despite having remotes because i am too lazy to walk across to the other side of the room to go get it lol
To answer your other question innr are fine, but i have had more bulbs die from them than any of my philips hue. White colors arent quite as good imo (HA reports kelvin range being better, but looks worse to the eye imo). They dont seem to support transitions, so no fading from off to on just straight jaring on. The HA transitions in the light.turn_on service work still though.
Ive found no good (cheap) alternative. I hear good things about nano leaf bulbs though, havent tried them yet… due to expense as well.
Thanks for the precise reset timings, Dimitri! That helped a lot.
What I found interesting in re-pairing Hue stuff originally on my Hue Hub to move over to ZHA/SkyConnect is that the different device-names & subsequent entity names I gave these Hue devices somehow got updated in the automations I’d already had for the Hue-based device-names/entities, and yet still didn’t work! I had to delete the seemingly-correct new-named Hue device-names/entities from those automations & re-select them, then they worked fine. So wierd!
@indeeed The hate for Philips/Signify’s recent account/cloud requirement is arguable; there was always a negative flip-side to having no authentication on access to the Hue Hub by anyone else on your network (i.e. guests, whom you might not want to fiddle with your lights).
Any hate for their actual products, is way less arguable, and when paired to a HA Zigbee radio instead of the Hue Hub makes the above completely irrelevant.
The bulletproof reliability and 2 year battery life of the 7 Hue Motion Sensors (5 indoors, 2 outdoors) I’ve had for several years, compared to the Ikea Tradfri Motion Sensors I also bought a year ago & already had to replace their batteries, & frequently don’t trigger, and they take up no less space than the Hue’s, leaves the competition in the dust and worth the $40 each.
This post, rather than the one shown as “the correct answer” worked great for me. It took me a couple of tries to get the timing and sequence right, but when I turned it on that last time, the lights flashed a couple of times then immediately showed up in Zigbee pairing in HA.
So what I wish I’d known an hour ago:
No extra Philips-specific hardware, just a standard HA running on a Pi with a Zigbee antenna. No remote, no bridge, nothing.
When the lights initially power on, they pair automatically with Amazon Echo / Alexa, if you have it. I believe you’ll need to delete them from Alexa before pairing with HA.
Bring up HA Zigbee pairing
Then do the 5 sec on, 2 sec off thing, like Dmitri so helpfully explained.
On the “final on,” the lights will blink off then on, then immediately pair in HA.
Give them names ‘n’ areas and start playing with your new toy.
