Help with Philips Hue Dimmer

Hoping someone can figure out what I did wrong...

I got a Philips Hue Dimmer today. It is actually my second one . My first one is paired directly to the Hue hub and works great. But I wanted to pair this dimmer to the Hubitat so it could control some Inovelli RGBW smart bulbs. I pulled the dimmer out of the box, and it paired nicely to Hubitat with the correct driver being used - no problems there at all.

I then went directly to Rule Machine and started creating a rule that used a Button Device as the trigger. I set up my simple rule as shown here:

I thought this should work, but whenever I press Button 1 on the Hue Dimmer...nothing happens. The LED in the upper left corner of the dimmer stays solid red for 2-3 seconds, and then just turns off. My lights do not turn on. Same thing happens if I press Button 4 (lights don't turn off). If I go into the Device itself in Hubitat and mimic pressing Button 1 or 4, the lights behave as expected.

I'm kinda stumped. What else do I need to do to get the dimmer buttons to work?

Oh, and Happy New Year to you all!

That sounds more like an issue with the dimmer communicating with the hub rather than you're rule. The red light on the dimmer I think means there is a comm's issue, plus the fact that if you mimic'd the button presses and things worked, then that also points to comm's.

All that said, I'm not entirely sure how best to diagnose the exact issue. I'm pretty sure there are some Zigbee logs somewhere, just can't remember where to find them.... I would suggest going into the device setup page (I'm assuming where you manually did the button presses) and turn on the various logging preferences, then open the logs page to see what happens when you press one of the physical buttons. I would also suggest being close to the HE hub when you press a button to try and rule out interference, etc.

If it comes to it you could try and re-pair the Dimmer to see if it was some kind of glitch.

Hopefully someone else a little more knowledgeable may come along and provide some more concrete advice.

Happy New Year to you as well.
Simon

Your logic looks sound. Did a quick search on these forums and looks like a few others have had some issues with the Hue dimmer paired directly to HE while others seem fine like this thread:

My money is on the dimmer based on the handful of other threads I found on this site but if it was me, just to be safe I would try to run the rule you have here a few different ways to figure out if itā€™s an issue with the dimmer, the conditional actions, the scene, or the individual devices youā€™re trying to turn on.

Some examples:

  1. If you remove the conditional actions, can you trigger a single hue light (not group) on/off with a press of button 1?

  2. If so, will your conditional actions on the dimmer trigger for a non-hue product?

  3. If you create a virtual button and swap the trigger from your hue dimmer to the new virtual... does your rule work with the virtual button press?

OK, I think I got it resolved. Here is what I did:

  1. Deleted my rule
  2. Deleted the Hue Dimmer from HE
  3. Reset the Hue Dimmer (using a paper clip and the tiny button on the back of it)
  4. Joined the dimmer to the Hue hub
  5. Let the Hue hub perform a software update on the dimmer (this took a while)
  6. Deleted the dimmer from Hue hub
  7. Reset Hue Dimmer again
  8. Re-joined the dimmer to HE

Everything is working as expected now. For the record, I seem to have the RWL020 Hue dimmers.

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Looks like I spoke too soon. I tried the dimmer about an hour later, and now it's back to not responding again and showing me the red LED. I did nothing in that time span. Ugh...this is frustrating...

How far from the Hubitat hub is the Hue Remote? Do you have any ZigBee repeater devices? What ZigBee channel is your Hue hub on? How about your Hubitat ZigBee channel? What 2.4GHz WiFi channel(s) are your wireless access points using?

Yeah, like @ogiewon I'd be checking some of the comm's settings and strength. Even when I had my dimmers connected to my Hue bridge some that were furthest from the bridge would drop off and take a bit of "mashing" of the buttons to wake up. You might need to look at some repeaters, though the other settings like comparing channels, etc, are worth checking first.

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Four finger reset has it working again...for now.

My HE Zigbee radio is on channel 20. Hue hub is on channel 11. My 2.4 Ghz wifi says "Auto ( 2(P) + 6(S) )" (whatever that means).

For what it's worth, I do have a Sylvania Smart Plug in this same room (Zigbee) and that plug is rock solid. That should act as a repeater, shouldn't it?

I would expect so. You can confirm it by checking the Zigbee routing details:
[Edit - Better formatted URL]
http://hub_ip/hub/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo

You should see you're Sylvania plug in the list of neighbours towards the top of the screen.

Also, I brought the Hue Dimmer down into the same room as the HE Hub (while I was typing my previous message) and it's back to acting like it's offline again. So I don't think it is anything about distance or interference.

It could also depend on how it is routing, i.e. if it going via a device that it has trouble communicating with. This starts to stretch my knowledge in this area, but the best I can offer is to check the routing table and post the results for others to interpret, as well as any research you want to do yourself, there's some good posts around about Zigbee Mesh setups and diagnosing problems.

Is this the correct path? First time I have ever seen something like this. I browsed to:

http://[my_hub_ip]/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo and I got a 404 error

Yeah, couldn't quite get the formatting right. Not sure why you would get a 404...

Nevermind, my mistake. Your path was correct. I thought that /hub in your URL meant the IP of my hub. Now I see it is http://hub_ip/hub/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo

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That's a better formatted URL, thanks. Updated my earlier post so anyone else doesn't need to read through the conversation to get it.

So do you see your plug and the dimmer?

Yes, although I am not 100% sure how to read this. I see the smart plug in the Neighbor Table Entry and the Route Table Entry. But I ONLY see the dimmer in the Route Table Entry. Does that make sense? Should I see it in both spots?

That sounds right. Like I said, my knowledge in this is limited. I believe the idea is the "neighbours" are the repeaters and they are connecting to the HE hub, ideally with a strong and permanent connection, then the other "child" devices have the option to connect to a repeater close to them or the HE hub itself. You'll see in the Route Table it tells you the [child device] "via" [repeater], then at the top in the Neighbour table entry you get an idea of the repeaters signal strength. I believe an LQI up around 255 is good and in and out costs as close to 1 are also good.

In terms of solving your problem, it's probably others here who are better placed to help. If you are still stuck I'll find some of the community members from other threads and tag them to see if they can help.

Yeah, if I refresh I do see how things update. I moved the dimmer back to its normal location and I can see in the Route Table that it has changed which repeater it is using. It is NOT using the smart plug in the same room, which is kinda odd.

Thanks for all your help so far. This community is amazing, and I continue to learn so much from other people like yourself who are much smarter than I am.

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No worries, yeah I get some odd connections as well. In the end I only look at it when I strike an issue and even then don't always try to correct anything like which repeaters are used, etc.

If you still have issues post back and someone else may be able to help.