ZHA does have Zigbee groups, they are just entities under the “device entry” of your coordinator once you set them up
If you mean changing all lights in a room or zone at the same time, yes that is possible with ZigBee groups.
I think that it’s about those fancy Hue Entertainment features that only the Hue Hub with official Hue bulbs has…
Wouldn’t a custom dashboard offer the same features? I never really like the native Hue app UI (though iConnectHue is pretty good).
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Diyhue breaks on almost a weekly basis I am even in their chat helping out but it’s far from stable
Oh, OK, yeah, that is a proprietary extension to the ZigBee protocol that right now only the Hue bridge supports. There have been some feature requests for this on Z2M and I think in principle it is known how it works, but no-one has actually implemented it so far.
I tried it some months ago when switching the first three of our Hue lights off the bridge, mostly for bringing back the Amazon Echo integration, and I got it setup but didn’t succeed in adding my lights from ZHA onto that virtual bridge. I thought it would be more stable and compatible now…
Yes! That would be very good… unfortunately the dashboard creating is still not simple for most people. It would take me weeks to create something and with a job and 2 kids I just can’t annymore 
Is it really bare metal? I switched years ago to Z2M (now ZHA), but hearing all this fuzz about this change makes me wonder what are the benefits of using Hue integration vs ZHA/Z2M.
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Thank.you for the info. One question about zones and area. HA have area and zones. But in HUE app when you turn on a zone all lights ate go on off change color on same time. Will this be the same in HA or will all bulbs on or of one by one. That’s was so great of the HUE. Turn on whole house as it seems all bulbs are just one.
I used in past milight and every bulb went on then the order then the other. So it took some time before everything was changed.
The experience within the Hue eco system is certainly a bit smoother (at the moment), but I recently switched and I am not missing much functionality-wise:
- Scenes are currently not auto-discovered and HA has no support for transitions in MQTT scenes (the service allows you to set them, but the there is no way to pass the parameter to Z2M - also Z2M probably wouldn’t know what to do with it, but we don’t even get that far).
- Transitions for lights can only be set in whole seconds, Fractions are theoretically supported by Z2M, but neither the native frontend nor HA auto-discovery support that in their UI.
- Setting up switches (buttons, dimmers …) is tedious with HA automations. Switch Manager works pretty well most of the time, but I am having issues with transitions for one light group and debugging it is much harder than with native HA automations.
I wouldn’t doubt this has something to do with some requirement to use the “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” on a companies products (as well as wanting to sell user data). Probably something like notifying users when there is a security vulnerability.
No, you need to set up ZigBee groups for that (which Z2M and ZHA both support),
Thank you. Then the switch to Zigbee is a option when HUE is really break everything.
Will the blue HA zigbee matter stick be a good one then?
Sorry for little off topic questions. But also think lots of non technical users are here and read this all.
this is not to say you shouldn’t move to ZHA, or complain to Hue. We need to, and I did.
Ha talks to Hue in away, it lets the Hue bridge do the talking to the bulbs as much as possible. So HA does not over burden the Hue system (which is easily done…).
Consider a HA script that flashes the lights. Before, we wrote that in some nifty HA scripting logic, continuously sending commands to the Hue Bridge and via the bridge to those bulbs.
These days, the HA integration just sends the command to the Bridge and lets that take care of it, and we can rest assured no system burden in introduced. We take advantage of the Hue bridge as much as possible, and in that, make HA much simpler too.
It pushes actively, so anything on the Bridge is sent immediately and available in the integration in HA
Active/Dynamic scenes are a very nice thing, all local on the bridge, or bulb even.
I have to agree adding those bubs to a Skyconnect Zigbee controller is effortless. Takes less than 3 secs. and initially the options dont look bad, and we can even set some initial settings we can not in the HA Hue integration (they’re all available on bridge though)(dont consider the Sensors, those are created via Powercalc, and are not available on the bulb/bridge):
But that is as far as it goes. No scenes on those lights, no Areas/Rooms, no connection to their motion sensors, switches, security sensors either, which is what I use without having to do anything in HA, and have to work when HA is down…
So yes, you can easily connect the bulbs and have no Cloud. But no, the experience is not the same. Far from it.
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But you can set up scenes (AFAIK even “active scenes”) with Z2M, and you can use effects like “blink”. Automations have to be set up in HA (for example motion-controlled light), but that was technically the same with the Hue Bridge - it didn’t use ZigBee direct binding for anything. When the bridge was disconnected or rebooting, no light switch or motion sensor did anything.
Believe we shouldn’t let this topic turn in to a can/can not do in ZHA or what ever. HA can do a lot, but it takes a lot where Hue is easy.
This should be about Hue/Signfy not abusing our private data.
I dont mind creating an account, have a lot of those… I do mind about not knowing where my data went, and that things might start Not to work locally when I close down that connection…
Much of that has yet to be answered to by Signify, and we need to press on them to do so.
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Because of their increasing focus on the cloud data storage, I sold my Hue hub and I connect to my Hue bulbs using HA and an universal open hub. Since then I deleted my Hue cloud account.
For my home automation, I just need local access, no cloud required.
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on the connections / apps that are allowed on your Bridges, it’s interesting to go to the advanced settings, (which reroutes to your account settings in the account.meethue.com environment. I had 132 apps connecting there 
most of them very old (older Ha instances, some that I had tested a few times) there are a Lot of Google listed (not sure if deleting 1 of them deletes them all…) and several python_hue listings.
taking out the non-used ones cant be bad, but dont want to break current functionality just yet, so need to understand which are which. In any case, Hue is very transparent there, listing all connected services we can delete individually (and, have allowed our selves in the first place earlier). So, not complaining, just being precise
Correct me if I am wrong, but why are you worried about Signify/Hue sharing your data when you are happy to use Alexa?
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