Discovering Hue Bridge and Hue bulbs

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1

I have my HE up and running, and I'm working on device discovery, and have some questions around the Philips Hue bridge and bulbs.

I initially had the Hue Bridge (HB) up and running with two Hue bulbs. Control of the bulbs in the Hue app works fine. Next, I received my Hubitat Elevate (HE), and installed it. The HE discovered my HB, and the two Hue bulbs that were connected to it when it was discovered. So far so good.

I've now added two more Hue bulbs around the house, and they work in the Hue mobile app. I've tried to discover them with the HE, but they don't show up.

Can anyone suggest how to get these added? Sorry if this is a trivial case, but I'm still wet behind the ears with this stuff.

I've also added an ecobee 3 lite thermostat to the HE without issue.

Today I've added a Google Home Mini at home, and configured it with the Google Home app. Its aware of all four Hue bulbs and the ecobee thermostat.

I also added the HE to the Google Home app config, which now means I have duplicates of two of the Hue bulbs - one set (of 4) connected directly to the Google Home, and the 2 recognized by the HE also appearing a second time, without any configured room information.

Any advice on:

  1. How to get the HE to recognize the two Hue bulbs it can't currently see.
  2. Will I have the same issue adding additional Hue bulbs where they aren't recognized by the HE, even though they are by the Hue Bridge? Is there a best practice to use for this?
  3. Is there a best practice for the Google Home app configuration? Should I simply add the HE, and then have the Google Home Mini direct any actions for devices connected/controlled via the HE to it, or should devices show up directly so that the Google Home Mini can send them commands on its own?

Sorry - lots of questions. Hoping for best advice!

Thanks,
Steve

2

Have you installed the Hue Bridge Integration app? It's a native app but needs to be installed in order for HE to see the bulbs. If so the new bulbs will show up in the app as newly discovered and you can then use the app to add them as HE devices.

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3

Is there a bulb hanging out there from before that you didn’t add? I had that with a cree bulb that was still paired to Hue, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with it in HE, so it was just sitting in the list of discovered bulbs from the previous time I ran discovery.

So when I went to run discovery again at a later date to try to find two new bulbs I had added to the Hue bridge, the option wasn’t there to discover them. But once I added the Cree bulb that was just hanging out in the list, I could then run discovery again, and the new bulbs were found so I could then add them too.

I know it’s not the same as what you’re describing, but it might be something to go on to figure out the issue.

4

This is the way I do it. There’s no reason both can’t control the bridge, and it works fine. It does cause a delay with sync in the HE integration of a minute ( which is a polling setting in the integration that has to be manually enabled), but I don’t get all worked up about stuff like that. If it’s a problem for the way you want to set things up, then you can instead share the bulbs with Google Assistant via the HE integration with Google and they’ll stay in sync immediately.