I am having a problem with using my Hue bulbs directly paired with HE. If I try to power on the bulbs with a specific color or color temp and at a specific brightness the bulbs will briefly turn on at the prior color/ct and brightness level, then adjust to the requested settings instead of turning on with specified values. The reason this sucks is that the lights in question I am trying to use in a nightlight routine, where they come on at a low brightness and a very warm ct for the CT bulbs or red for the color bulbs. Having them come on at full brightness and a harsher white before adjusting makes for a bad nighttime experience.
This worked fine when on the Hue Bridge, and other zigbee lights I have paired to HE also work as expected, including other hue products like the Hue Play.. It’s only the Hue Bulbs that seem to have this issue when paired with HE directly.
I have gone back and forth with the generic and advanced drivers, played with just about setting on those drivers to no avail. Are there any community drivers specific to the Hue bulbs I could try, or has anyone else has this problem and found a solution?
For now I have put them back onto the Hue Bridge as being blinded by a flash of light in the middle of the night really wasn’t an option. Though I would like to eventually migrate all my bulbs. The main reason I started using one of my HE instead of the Hue Bridge was I had bumped into one of it’s limits, surprisingly not the number of lights limitations (though I was close) there’s also a limit on the number of rooms/zones which I exceeded. With some of my lights migrated off I am back in an OK spot for now, but would really like to figure this out for the future.
How are you turning the bulbs--i.e., what app (and what actions if it's a rule)? If you use the "Advanced" drivers, you can prestage level when the bulbs are off, so that may help some, though you'll probably still see the old color. The Generic drivers let you do this too and I think support color too, but the implementation is a bit odd since it's a preference that overrides the behavior of the standard commands. In any case, there may be ways around this or at least to minimize the issue.
I was trying to use the Built-in Motion Lighting app, but I also tried using RM with the Dimmer functions "Set Color Temperature and Level" as well as "Set Color and Level" depending on the bulb in question. Neither worked as expected.
I did see the preset level function in the advanced drivers, as well as the enable color pre-staging option on the generic drivers. I tired both in different combinations to varying degrees of success.
The best I case I was able to get working was with the CT bulbs using the advanced drivers. When using RM I set the "Preset Level" to the desired nightlight level, then set the color temperature, the light would fade on to the preset level but it still started with the prior color temp before changing to the desired one.. Much less harsh than a bright flash of light, and much closer to how I'd like them to work, but still not quite the desired behavior.
Oh well.. Thanks for the suggestion, it is very close to the desired behavior to mimic how they work on the Hue Bridge.
Yeah, I didn't spell it out, but the "Preset Level" thing before turning it on sounds like exactly what I was thinking. I think that in the future, you'll be able to do what you want; they've hinted that they are thinking about color and CT prestaging and it's just a matter of how to implement them (color, in particular, I can see having some challenges in its current state). I don't remember of the Generic drivers have these options, but again, they'd be preferences and but commands, would override the "standard" command behavior if enabled, and would thus require an explicit "on" command afterwards to actually turn on the bulbs, so you'd need either a rule or an app that knows about this behavior (which most won't). Probably the only other thing you can try until if/when the above happens--unless you want to keep them on the Bridge and use a third-party integration to activate a scene. (Hue Scenes are the only thing I've seen accesible via the API that go directly to the target state without hint of old states, though this may depend on bulb firmware.)
Could you get around the rooms/zones limit by using HE to manage all that and just use Hue to manage the individual bulbs?
Many of us choose to keep ZLL bulbs on Hue hubs since ZLL bulbs can cause issues on a network of mixed ZLL and ZHA devices. The Hue <> HE integration is quite solid and avoids any ZLL/ZHA routing problems.
(Hue Scenes are the only thing I've seen accesible via the API that go directly to the target state without hint of old states, though this may depend on bulb firmware.)
