For me picking the Hue ecosystem because it had a hub with a local API was a key deciding point way back before I started using Home Assistant it even though Hue is more expensive. It’s been a solid system and I’ve never felt any desire to drop the hub and pair them directly to ZHA. I was gladly continuing to pay the premium for Hue products because an account/cloud was not required… but now it feels like I need to reevaluate because once accounts are required it’s always the start of a downward slope until one day for “security” the local API is closed off, the same way requiring an account now claims to “enhance security” somehow.
Obviously not all is lost on the hardware since pairing Hue bulbs directly to HA (and drop the bridge) saves having to replace everything plus honestly I’m probably not going to find too many alternatives for their outdoor products (I have a decent amount of Calla bollards and Lily spots). I’d lose Hue firmware updates without their hub though. I’ve kept Hue as it is with their hub integrating to HA because it works and worked well for me: no reason to change something that’s not broken.
When I saw that notice in the Hue app last week what it did do is prompt me to buy a bunch of Nanoleaf Matter over Thread A19, BR30, and lightstrips to start getting some hands on time with that. And it turns out the Nanoleaf bulbs actually have a higher CRI than Hue does. Of course now I’ve got a situation where I have a Zigbee mesh, a Thread mesh, the Hue zigbee mesh, and a z-wave mesh so maybe the Hue hub should ultimately be phased out if only to reduce the number of wireless meshes.
I always love the statement “for your continued security”. The hackers of the world are hitting everything the corporations of the world are pushing. Stay away from apps that involve the cloud or a corporate account.
I suggest disabling “Automatic updates” in the Hue app (Settings > Software update > Automatic updates) as well as blocking the Hue bridge MAC address in your router so it cannot connect to the Internet. The local API should still work - just trying to prevent Signify from downgrading the value of the Hue system.
Success! Here is how I was able to move a Hue bulb to HA in ZHA: open up your Zigbee device in HA and add a new one so it’s in discovery mode, then delete the light from the Hue app and it will show up in about 10 seconds.
I know that sounds simple but I went through a lot of trial and error to get to that. I had a previously deleted bulb that just wouldn’t get discovered by Zigbee no matter what I tried so I added it to the Hue App and immediately deleted it and it finally worked. I haven’t played with it much as native Zigbee but this gives me hope!
I’ve read that it’s in paring mode for a very short time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case when you just turn it on, and perhaps its because mine was paired in its past and a brand new bulb will pair up right away.
It looks like a fast color loop is all you get for effects, so I’ll have to see if theres a blueprint or something for a less spastic color change or create my own. But so far it’s fine.
It’s worth noting that if you try to go to this support contact page with any sort of ad blocker or refuse cookies you can’t use it - just more evidence that tracking is on their mind!
As the blog post pointed out, they can sell/share your data, per the privacy policies.
It is still unclear. It would work, for now, but there is no guarantee at this point.
Unfortunately no. Any zigbee bulb (or any zigbee device, FWIW) by design is supposed to talk to one zigbee mesh network. But as CO_4X4 mentioned above, the switch is fairly quick and painless, it seems.
Yes. If you recall, you have areas and zones also natively in Home Assistant.
So while the look and feel of the app is different, and the automations in HA is not the same as in Hue app, one can for sure duplicate the same setup in HA.
I’m really concerned about this, as in my home, a lot of systems rely on the Hue local API, for me, as I have a secondary (ZHA) zigbee network, it would be an easy switch-over in just some minutes, but my family probably will say nope for that as it would take hours to reprogram everything so it works like before, with the “Wake-Up” feature and the Alexa integration being the most critical and the most difficult features at the same time…
Not quite the same setup. Unless HA has the ability to pull off all of the light syncing that you can do in the hue app, all of the fun stuff will be missing.
Unfortunately the app gui is perfect for wife acceptance and I searched for something similar but it is not there if someone would create a app to control lights on the home assistant api I would happily donate that would actually bring home assistant a big step forward
I think what people are looking for in this case are ZigBee groups to efficiently target a group of lights at the same time with an action. Z2M (and ZHA as well, I presume) does have groups. What it does not have is a distinction between “zones” and “rooms”, though in practice that probably won’t make a difference. As with Hue, a light can be part of more than one group.
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.
