I am new to Home Assistant, but am already pretty well embedded with the Philips Hue ecosystem. I have a number of BR30, as well as Traditional White Ambient and White/Color bulbs throughout the house.
I went with Home Assistant, because I’m looking to go beyond the lighting side of automation. I know Philips Hue has a number of different accessories (most notably their Smart Dimmer and Motion Sensor) that I am interested in. My intended use case is using the Smart Dimmer to control lights (mostly Hue lights) but would like to use the Motion Sensor for not only lighting, but also some security applications.
My question is, in your humble opinions, would it be wiser to stay with the Hue ecosystem of accessories when possible? Or, will I have greater flexibility if I go third-party?
Mix your devices. I have both hue and ikea TRÅDFRI lights (recently just on the ikea hub), being controlled by zwave multisensors, which also controls zwave switches. Then you also have software sensors, so lights dimming when a movie plays on my tv etc…
Don’t think the philips hue nor ikea TRÅDFRI motion sensors send a report on their state, which is not good…
You don’t need compatibility between the two as Home Assistant fills the gap in the middle. Home Assistant is compatible with both so the two light ecosystems don’t actually talk to each other, HA talks to each separately.
Are you surprised that the dude in Ikea didn’t know about protocol interactivity
Apparently you can now add TRÅDFRI bulbs to hue as of a recent firmware update, just google it. But I couldn’t get that to work. I can confirm though that you can add the hue bulbs to the TRÅDFRI hub without issue…
And yeah, protocols don’t matter for interaction, hass is the middleman, as long as it can talk to all your devices then you can do whatever you want.
As you appear to have both a hue and tradfri gateway, which do you think you’ll be sticking with in the long run?
Assuming you dont need RGB lighting, which is not (yet) available for ikea ecosystem, as far as I am aware both are pretty much equal.
One grey are is groups… does tradfri support group operations like hue does?
I’m not working with groups directly in the Tradfri app as I group in Hass.
I’m currently with Ikea hub as that’s the one I managed to get the hue bulbs to pair with, not the other way around. Also, ikea controllers aren’t supported by HASS yet, however they directly control the lights, so it’s not really a problem (I monitor the lights switching off and turn zwave lights off as well in the bedroom).
Also, a small thing, but the Ikea hub has inbuilt cable management, so makes my server shelf a bit tidier
