Newbie here... need some advice. I have 80 Philips Hue lights divided equally between two Hue Bridges. One Bridge is upstairs for upstairs lights on Zigbee 25. The other is downstairs for downstairs lights on Zigbee 20. Wifi (2.4) is Channel 1.
I'm seeing some latency and inconsistency in setting groups, routines (Alexa) or scenes (HE). Here are my questions... assuming all use cases are originating with Alexa voice commands.
In terms of performance and reliability, is there a preference between:
a.) creating Rooms in Hue and integrating in HE as devices
b.) building Groups in Hubitat
Again with respect to performance and reliability, for customizing various lighting configurations (colors and levels), is there a preference between:
a.) setting up "Scenes" in HE
b.) setting up Alexa "Routines"
Getting some expert advice on this would save me a TON of time experimenting!
Yes, there could be a noticeable difference here, especially if your group has "a lot" of bulbs (I'm being vague because this may vary, but even with more than 2 or 3 you might notice). When you make a group of Hue bulbs on Hubitat, Hubitat has to send one command (over the LAN) for each bulb to Hue, which in turn sends one Zigbee command to each bulb. When you make a group on Hue and integrate that group into Hubitat, that gets reduced to one command from Hubitat to Hue, and Hue in turn utilizes Zigbee group messaging and sends only one command to its bulbs, as well. The end result will happen uniformly and more quickly this way.
Doing it all on Hubitat is unlikely cause problems in my experience (though I've never used extremely large Hubitat groups in this case and imagine you might encounter some rate-limiting on the Bridge), but even for just a few bulbs it could eliminate the so-called "popcorn effect" where bulbs turn on or off at slightly different times.
Between these two, I'd say there's minimal difference (but there's a third possibility you may wish to consider--more later). But in general, if you can do something on either Hubitat or Alexa, my advice would be to do it on Hubitat--then you'll get local execution (when possible), which probably leads to greater speed and more reliability, plus you'll get the ability to use them in other Hubitat automations (and a "scene" device like this--and many other device types--can get integrated into Alexa for use there). Some of this is just my personal preference, however.
The bigger difference between either of these would be "native" Hue scenes vs. Hubitat scenes (or an equivalent automation in Alexa). The Hue app can set up scenes that store most scene information on the bulbs/lights themselves, so recalling a scene from the Hue app, Alexa via the Hue integration, or a Hue accessory device (Tap, Dimmer, Aurora, etc.) involves only one command (and in the latter case usually doesn't need the Bridge to get involved at all--try it with powered down sometime if you want to be nerdy and have fun). This also means all bulbs get set to the scene at the same time, again eliminating a "popcorn"-style effect.
Using Hue bulbs (or any bulbs) on Hubitat with the Scenes app, you get the Hubitat hub's emulation of the above. It has to send a command to each bulb in the scene to set it to the desired state, so with large numbers of bulbs in a scene, you're again likely to notice some delay or different timing (in the worst case, possibly even some dropped commands, but I think the Bridge will queue them and the worst case here is simply a delay; with directly-paired Zigbee bulbs to Hubitat itself, I have seen this when addressing a bunch of Zigbee bulbs at once without group messaging, an issue that I don't seem to see getting much attention but one that I don't think is relevant to the Bridge).
So really in both cases, you can do it however you want, but the more you can "group" things on the Hue side, the better speed you're likely to see on the Hubitat side since that reduces the number of commands Hubitat has to send to Hue and the number of commands Hue (which is great about optimizing these things and setting up Zigbee groups and scenes for you behind the...scenes) has to send to itself. The big downside here is that the current official Hue Bridge integration for Hubitat does not have access to Hue scenes, which I mostly access using Hue accessories like the Tap and Dimmer. But maybe some day...
No, the stock Hue Bridge integration does not provide access to Hue scenes. You almost could fake this if Rule Machine supported HTTP PUTs, but I think it only supports POSTs (and GETs)--what I mean is that you could directly call the Hue scene activator via the HTTP API yourself if you create (or re-use Hubitat's, I guess) Hue username and use the correct URL and payload for your scene. Alas, even though that would be difficult and not user-friendly, it wouldn't be possible at all (without an extra app) right now.
A community integration (a port of the SmartThings community integration), Hue B Smart, does, but I haven't used it lately myself, so I can't speak to how well it works.
I can't comment with any authority on the performance questions, but I did grapple with whether or not to shift all my lights and rules from my hue bridge to HE.
In the end I chose to keep my lights, groups, scenes, sensors and rules on my hue bridge. There were plenty of posts on this forum about other peoples experiences and opinons about this topic to convince me to go that way, many covered in the post by @bertabcd1234. I had also seen the popcorn effect in some of my testing of HE. The deal-breaker for me was that when responding to the trigger for a rule, e.g. motion detected, HE could not easily and quickly interrogate the state of the lights. If I have the lights dimmed in a room I don't want a rule blinding me by switching to the pre-defined scene. Keeping them on the hue bridge also kept open the options for using third-party apps that hook into hue.
I do, however, have the lights and groups synced onto the HE hub, more so I can see there "current" status and switch them off via a HE dashboard.
I have also been able to develop a small HE app / driver to update a CLIP sensor (variable) I use in my rules on the hue bridge. Based on my experience with this, I would expect you could access almost all the Hue API if you want something developed to update details back on the bridge.
