Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box custom integration

Share your Projects! Custom Integrations
22

Very cool, now I can automatically select Music Mode on the big entertainment area when Spotify is running on my Chromecast, and Video Mode otherwise.

Now I just need to detect whether the music (or my mood) calls for High Intensity mode, or smooth low one :joy:

Do you need any help to get this merged into Home Assistant?

23

Do you need any help to get this merged into Home Assistant?

I have kind of given up on getting it in HA (at least for now) for a few reasons.

  • There are hundreds of open pullrequests and getting one merged can take weeks/months.
  • It would need quite some effort to get it up to a level that it would be accepted in HA without gaining any functional benefit (probably losing some functionality actually). This is mostly adding tests, cleaning up and reorganizing some things. I occasionally work a bit on these topics, but time is limited and low priority for me.
  • It is nice to be able to release updates outside of the HA release cycle. I can work on it when I have time (or quickly fix stuff when something breaks) and publish to HACS when I am ready without having to depend on HA releases.
24

I understand, I can imagine feeling the same way :slight_smile:

However, in this case, I’m more than happy to help out.

  • This is the only custom component I’m using at the moment
  • I’m not using HACS, and recent events have shown this is not the worst idea – especially since this is the only public facing application in my network.

So let me know if there is anything I can do to get things rolling.

25

Thank you for this! I’m still relatively new to Home Assistant. I’ve accomplished a fair amount in HA in 4-5 months as someone who can’t write code -presence based automations for lighting & climate control, custom Lovelace dashboard, adding sensors and more switches for better automation, etc. I’ve been bothered by my Hue Sync being left out in the cold. Now Sync is in HA and I’m quite happy about that!

Time to see what I can do with automations for it… Thanks again

1 Like
26

Thanks for the offer, but I just want to keep it as a little sideproject for now.

27

I connect all my philips hue bulbs and switches directly to HA with Conbee II. I don’t use the philips hue bridge anymore. Is it also possible with the sync box leds?

1 Like
28

Nope, this integration is for the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box which requires the Hue bridge.

29

Aside from pulling just the ON/OFF state of the sync box, can we pull the “sync state”?

I run everything through my sync box from the A/V receiver, but i only “Sync” the lights at certain times; I’d like to base automations on weather its syncing the lights at the moment or not, and maybe even switch the sync modes — video, game, intensity, brightness etc.

This possible in its current state?

EDIT: Yeah so I must look like an idiot asking this question as it does do all that; just not with mine. I did the HACS install, restarted HA, and I still don’t have any of the Services installed. The HACS install just creates a single Huesyncbox toggle entity, and binary sensor.

30

You should get a media_player entity with this custom_component. I have never had a binary_sensor or toggle entity implemented.
Are you sure it is this custom_component that got installed?

31

That binary showed up right after the hass restart. It’s the only thing referring to HueSync in hass. For some reason none of the media player entities loaded at all. I’ve verified the custom component install and everything is where it should be, but no entities. Does the Phillips Hue intergration need to be removed?

It was the only one in HACS I installed.

image
image1170×2532 261 KB

32

This integration just handles the Syncbox. It is completely seperate from the normal Philips Hue integration for the Hue bridge so you need to keep that one to control your lights.

To doublecheck that it has been installed correctly can you go to Configuration >> Info and see if “Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box” is in the list and has the Philips Hue icon. Also the links for documentation and issues should point to should point to the Github repo at the start of this topic.
image

There have been a few people that reported issues with discovery. You might want to try and powercycle the syncbox to see if it shows up then.

However thast still does not explain where the binary sensor comes from :confused:

33

Hi Michael,

The same thing is happening on my end as well. I installed it via HACS, but nothing is showing up under “Info” and the Sync Box didn’t get added in devices. I’ve power cycled the Sync Box and restarted HA, but still no dice. Any other ideas?

Thanks!

34

Scratch that. I was able to find it after some time. Thx!

35

Thanks for working on this, it is working great!

2 Likes
36

How I can create a switch to switch-on lights syncing using HomeKit?

37

I don’t use HomeKit myself, but judging from the documentation HomeKit - Home Assistant it seems that a MediaPlayer gets exposed as multiple switches on HomeKit. Based on that I would expect an on/off switch and a play/pause switch exposed on HomeKit by HA that will allow you to turn the syncbox on/off and start/stop syncing respectively.

38

So I could not get this to work correctly discovered the box, but no services, but I found a little work around and that was to take a old device remote, stick lables near butters then inside the hue app program the remote buttons to do stuff over ir, then used that to import services to my rm4 pro, long shot and long way to do it but got there… please dont stop working on this when you have time bud as I will switch to it when its all good.

39

Did you try the tips from the readme?

There have been reports where Home Assistant was not able to find the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box. It is unclear why it happens for some people.

Some workarounds that have been reported to work.

  • Powercycling the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box and/or restart Home Assistant and give it some time.
  • Add huesyncbox: to the configuration.yaml file as was needed for HA versions <= 0.114.0
40

Yep but after I saw others gett8ng it to work after 3 power cycles I almost gave up, un the end I did get it to work, but by removing it from my hue sync app and hue and resetting it and re pairing to app, restarted ha and it was found straight away

41

Glad that you got it working.

Kind of weird that it fixed itself with the same equipment.

I wish I could reproduce it on my dev or prod setup then I could debug it. Now I am basically blind on what is going wrong which basically makes it impossible to fix.