As I understand it, on the original Amazon Echo App it emulates a Hue Bridge.
When you search for devices from Alexa, it automatically responds (my assumption) as there's no need to "push the button" like you would do on a physical Hue Bridge.
Is there a way to make it also automatically respond if the discovery is from the Hue App (or any other "thing" that uses the older integration of Hue emulation) as opposed to Alexa?
Reason is that it would allow me to expose some Osram RGBW (which are happily on HE where I want them to remain) into the Hue App which is already in use by the family controlling lights from several Hue Bridges.
Maybe @mike.maxwell or @patrick can advise and if not, pretty please for a feature request?
I’ve never seen the hue bridge recognize a virtual device. That would require software written for the hue bridge, if it’s even possible. Does your family use iOS? If so you could just expose everything to HomeKit and have them use that instead. Add Homebridge to expose everything on HE. Do you need to build a Homebridge server out of a raspberry pie or an old computer. Not very hard actually.
hhhmm not sure what you mean by "virtual device", it's not really anything to do with the Hue Bridge itself.
It's emulating a Hue Bridge, which was common practice for quite some time, similar to how things like Wemo used to be emulated to allow both systems to be interfaced into third party Apps, systems, etc. For example deCONZ does this to allow its ZigBee devices to be used from within the Hue App (or any third party App that supports the Hue Bridge). Similarly with Home Assistant and many others.
Since HE already emulates a Hue Bridge to give Alexa integration "the old way" then I assume (maybe wrongly) that this is already a full enough emulation that it should work elsewhere too ... I hope.
I think we’re reading different books. Doesn’t sound like we’re talking about the same thing. I thought you wanted to see Osram stuff in the Hue app. The Hue app can only see what is on the Hue bridge. However, HomeKit can see everything that is on the Hue bridge, and if you add Homebridge to Hubitat, HomeKit can see everything that is on the HE hub too
Not quite, a Hue Bridge can be emulated as mentioned before. So anything that emulates a Hue Bridge can be added to the Hue App.
I believe that the original Amazon Echo App on HE emulates a Hue Bridge which is how Alexa can discover and control devices on HE locally (as opposed to via a Cloud to Cloud Skill) - Alexa sees HE as a Hue Bridge.
What I am asking and hoping one of the HE staff can answer, is whether they have something in the code the blocks HE from being discovered by the Hue App (or others) and only allows it be discovered by Alexa. And if so can they remove it to allow it to be universally used, not just by Alexa.
I know you want these bulbs to remain directly paired with your HE hub...can you please explain why? Could these bulbs be paired with your Hue hub, and then integrated with your HE hub? This would probably provide the best solution to allowing the Hue mobile app to control these bulbs.
My understanding is that these particular bulbs may be poor Zigbee HA repeaters. Moving them to the Hue hub might also improve the stability of your Zigbee mesh network.
I have a few osram bulbs and they can indeed cause some issues as ZHA repeaters, but when I looked into the possibility of pairing them direct to a hue bridge it seemed like it won’t work out.
In the US at least, the osram bulb firmware includes the ZHA profile but not ZLL. Apparently Osram customer support used to facilitate requests to flash to a firmware that includes ZLL, but at some point they stopped allowing people to do that.
If they eventually update the bulb firmware to include zigbee 3.0 support as they claim they will, then I think it might be possible to pair directly with a hue bridge?
Yes, essentially, but not just limited to Osrams, could be anything else that's compatible / exposed to Alexa via the existing Amazon Echo App Hue emulation.
Bottom line is it's not a big deal, just a nice to have as it would consolidate some of the HE devices (those that I chose, in this case the Osrams) into the Hue App that the rest of the family already uses for controlling of stuff on my Hue Bridge.
My thought chain was, that since the Amazon Echo App already does the Hue emulation for integrating with Alexa "the old way" then it shouldn't be a far stretch for it to work in the Hue App or anything else that can control a Hue Bridge?
Also these Osrams are ZHA and had been happily on SmartThings for quite some time where according to my XBEE they were doing OK as repeaters. I certainly didn't notice any issues. From memory ST even did several firmware updates for them, I believe that they worked with Osram to iron out a lot of the early problems with them.
The issue of these bulbs being poor repeaters in certain networks still remains, if they work in your situation, perfect.
I have all of my zigbee zha and zll bulbs on a separate Hubitat hub (21 bulbs currently), and they are just fine playing amongst themselves, when these were on my main production hub with all my zigbee sensors and actuators there were nothing but problems...
