So I must be doing something wrong with the Groups and Scenes app as I can't seem to get my scenes to capture correctly with my Hue Lights. Essentially what I want to do is create a rule in RM that uses the center button on a pico remote to cycle back and forth between 2 scenes. Here's what I've been doing:
I started in the groups app and created a group called "Office Lights (Group)." I used the (Group) to distinguish it from the group in my Hue Hub also called Office Lights. I went ahead and added my 4 office lights.
I then essentially repeated the process above by creating a new scene called "Office Lights Relax" using the "Relax" preset in the PH app. I captured that scene and saw that it's actually captured with the same values as the prior group (Concentrate) and both scenes list themselves as being "On."
So It's essentially defining both scenes as the exact same thing despite having been captured under different lighting states. I don't know if I missed a step or if I'm just flat out doing something wrong. Any help would be appreciated.
That topic is a good read but it doesn't really explain why capturing my scenes doesn't seem to work correctly. Despite capturing under 2 different created scenes and in 2 different states of color/temp/brightness, it seems to capture them as the same which is the real underlying problem I'm having.
With Hue, this is almost always the result of not waiting for the polling interval to pass before trying to capture the scenes in Hubitat. You can check the polling interval in the Hue Bridge Integration app on Hubitat. The default is 1 minute (and is probably fine for most uses, just necessary to keep in mind for this). The light states in Hubitat will not be accurate if changes are made outside Hubitat until the next poll occurs. To work around this, you can make changes from within Hubitat, though if you're trying to emulate a Hue scene, it's understandably often easier to activate it there instead.
So, that's one option (waiting for the poll). Rather than doing that, you can also refresh the Hue Bridge device in Hubitat, which does the same on demand (again note that it's the Bridge device, not the bulbs/groups).
Finally, there's an occasional concern with Hue scenes, particularly ones that use color instead of color temperature. Lately, I've noticed the Bridge saves these using the CIE xy color space, whereas Hubitat's model uses hue/saturation (hs) or color temperature. Hubitat does not attempt to convert xy to hs, nor is this easy to do reliably (I've been trying to get something to work on my custom Hue integration for a while now). So, if Hue happens to set the color in xy mode, Hubitat will likely fail to interpret it properly (though if it also accurately reports hue and saturation values, it might, but if in xy mode it's not required to). Even color temperature scenes seem to get saved in xy on Hue for me, but these seem to work because Hue also accurately updates the color temperature information in what it sends back to Hubitat, so it works. If you notice problems a poll or refresh doesn't solve, this could be the problem. The best workaround here would be to manually set the lights from Hubitat to the desired color or color temperature so Hubitat knows the correct values in one of the two models it understands (which as a bonus also eliminates the need to wait for the next poll).
That last bit might have been more than you wanted to know... (but it's something I discovered when working on my Hue integration and importing scenes in to Hubitat--which by the way you could also use to just directly access the Hue scenes from Hubitat if you wanted)
I didn't even think of the polling. I'll take a look at that.
To your second point, that's actually really helpful. The scenes in the Hue App typically involve color and the bulbs I'm using are just the white ambiance. I'll toy with it later.
Those only do color temperature (shades of white), so you should be good! Or at least that's what my experience suggests--Hue seems to really like xy color now, but on all the bulbs I've used, CT still gets reported accurately even if the bulb isn't in that "mode."
As an aside, color temperature is also really easy to set from Hubitat directly on the device. I think Hue can go 2000-6500 (units are Kelvin if you aren't familiar; lower is orange-y and higher is blue-ish, with a Hue's warm default somewhere around 2700). A bit easier than color, I think, though still not usually as easy as a Hue scene.
Well I tried reducing the poll time to 10 seconds (the lowest setting available) and that I didn't work. I also went and refreshed the hub manually through the device page but no luck. Scenes are still being captured the same despite the different light states
Are the device states (for the bulb or group you're capturing) accurate? Go to "Devices," then the page for your Hue bulb or group. See what it reports under "Current States." For the White Ambiance bulbs, the "color temperature" attribute is probably the most important. If you aren't sure how to interpret these, Relax is usually around 2250, Read around 2700, Bright around 3000 (I might have these last two backwards), Concentrate around 4000, and Energize around 5000. The non-color-temperature-centric scenes, if those are even made available for non-Color devices, will vary from bulb to bulb.
If these aren't accurate, the scene that is captured will never be, so I'd start here. If they aren't accurate, I suppose it's possible (but unlikely) that the Bridge refresh/poll isn't doing anything and possible that Hue is reporting only xy data back that Hubitat can't interpret. With the Hubitat's built-in Hue integration, there isn't a good way to tell (its logging is limited), so you'd need to know your away around a Hue debugger/API to really see that for sure.
The device states are correct so I don't think that's the problem. I think I found the issue though. Within the create/edit scene menu, I went into the adjust scene setting menu and found that the bulb was set to RGB. I changed it to CT and adjusted the temperature that matched up to the scene itself and just left it like that.
My guess is that scenes typically use colors, specifically a mix of colors. So trying to group lights together is producing this weird result. I have since created another test scene but instead of using the office lights group, I selected the lights individually and captured them. It seems to have captured them correctly as rather than having a hue and saturation value, it actually displays a temperature value.
So my guess is a conflict between scenes and non color bulbs. Looks like I'll be using bulbs individually rather than groups.
(but it's something I discovered when working on my Hue integration and importing scenes in to Hubitat--which by the way you could also use to just directly access the Hue scenes from Hubitat if you wanted)
