I've connected my Hue Dimmer, Hubitat recognised it without any issues and set it up with the built in type "Philips Dimmer Button Controller". It works fine for a while, but then seems to disconnect. If I remove it and rediscover it, then it works again for a while, before disconnecting again.
Any ideas what could be wrong?
I used it with the system Button Controllers app, and that works great, until it disconnects.
Connecting directly to the hub or through the hue hub integration?
Directly to the Hub using the built in "Philips Dimmer Button Controller" driver
Very odd. I have 3 directly connected, mine never miss a beat.
How far away is it from your hub? Maybe your ZigBee mesh is weak at that location. Have you tried keeping it nearer to the hub or a repeater, unless you happen to think it already is?
FYI, that isn't supported (and would probably be difficult to get to work nearly as well since it would have to rely on frequently polling the Hue bridge, which doesn't have a way to "send" this information in real time via the HTTP(S?) API Hubitat is using).
Well, it can control Hue Lights if directly connected to the hue hub, right? Also, when directly connected to HE, what driver do you have to use?
That's not the same network. Completely different mesh.
I'm aware, thanks.
But I figured since polling is now available in the Hue integration and 2 way communication obviously works the dimmer would be supported too. Also, why would the Hue dimmer switch be listed under Phillips and everything else is listed under Hue. That just makes things very difficult to keep straight.
I already tested it near the hub, about a metre way. And that location is a metre from a repeater too, so I dont think that is the problem, as it happened twice in that location.
Everything else? There's only the Hue Motion Sensor. I'm guessing the Philips Dimmer Button Controller name is historic and could probably be changed.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. @bertabcd1234 was suggesting that maybe his hue dimmer is dropping off because the HE Zigbee mesh network is weak and needs repeaters for the location he's trying to keep the Hue Dimmer in. It sounded from your question that you were asking if he could pair it with the Hue bridge and control the hub lights without issue, but can't keep it connected to the HE hub. As @bertabcd1234 explained, using the Hue dimmer with the Hue Integration is not supported.
What's your HE Zigbee channel? Hue devices don't like the channels not available to the Hue bridge.
You mean like any of these? LMAO. I mean, I'm not pulling this our of my ass here. There are other devices listed under hue.
They all say Bridge. Is that not self-explanatory?
The channel is 22. What are the Hue bridge channels? And how can I see what channel the bridge is on? I take it I dont want the same channel as the Hue network?
My point is the hue devices aren't sorted together. So, when you look for one you could miss the other. I didn't see the driver for the dimmer switch cause I was looking under H. Why is that so hard for you to get? Maybe you didn't miss it. But I did. If you don't agree, fine. But let it go.
11, 15, 20 and 25
I'm not dragging anything or anyone through the mud. It's quite obvious that those are for the bridge because they are labelled Bridge. They also start with lowercase hue and they're all grouped at the bottom of the list of built-in drivers. I honestly don't see how this is a problem for you to keep straight.
The Hue integration has always relied on polling (new firmware just enabled a configurable polling interval). The communication is only "bidirectional" by brute force--changes made on the Hue network rather than through Hubitat will take until the next poll/sync on the Hubitat side to register.
The Hue integration in Hubitat is presumably there because people want to control Hue devices from Hubitat, and since the Hue Dimmer is basically just a button device that just sends events and can't really receive commands, I understand why it's not supported. Even if it were supported through the integration, there would be considerable delay (the next poll time) between pressing the button and Hubitat figuring out it was pressed by parsing the JSON it receives from the Bridge and determining if the "last press" time is newer than the last one it knew about. (I think I've seen some ST integrations that work like this.) Pairing it directly to Hubitat is probably the best option if you want to use it this way; I've tried it that way before but like its behavior on Hue better, so I moved it back and didn't really use it on Hubitat long enough to see if I had problems.
SmartHomePrimer was correct with what I meant--I assume you had the Dimmer paired to Hubitat. I forgot about the channel idea, which isn't a bad thing to check if you can since it sounds like a weak network is probably not the issue.
As for the name of the driver, I'm assuming they just happened to choose "Hue" for one and "Philips" for the other. If you pair it now (as opposed to moving over from a custom driver you needed on old firmware), it should find it automatically so you don't need to worry, and the "hueBridge" drivers are ones you shouldn't ever have to manually choose. If you ask them nicely, they might change the name of the dimmer driver to match alphabetically. 
Oh, sorry. Missed that question before.
Hue App > Settings > Hue Bridges > tap the "i" > "Zigbee channel change"
Thanks for all the help. Changing the Hubitat Zigbee channel to 11 seems to have fixed the disconnect issue. It's been connected for 10 hours now, previously it only managed about an hour each time,
BTW for those in the UK, Philips have a 3 for 2 promotion on at the moment at meethue.com . So a cheap way to get some Dimmers. Now I have it working in Hubitat I bought a few more.
Download the Hubitat app
