I have seen posts of people mentioning how Lightify devices have messed up their Zigbee mesh and similar statements have been made about Hue, where the solution has often been to pair Hue bulbs with the Hue hub and use the hub integration instead. If this has been the best option for Hue, would it be worth creating a Lightify Gateway integration to access Lightify devices?
They now have a public API (https://docs.lightify-api.com), so it should be possible to integrate the Lightify Gateway with Hubitat nowadays.
Just interested as I have multiple Lightify components as well as the gateway which I would like to integrate with HE to include them in automations. I realize that some Lightify devices work fine with HE (like LED strips, Bulbs and Outlets), but adding their buttons is a challenge as well as the mentioned mesh issues some have reported. So, maybe integrating with the gateway is the best solution.
Cool. I assume you are mainly looking into this because of your experience with Lightify devices being poor routers.
I would also be interested in pairing my Lightify devices directly to HE instead of using the gateway. Especially since the gateway integration would be a cloud based solution I would like to avoid if possible.
But it would be good to have both options for those cases where the poor routing causes issues. My primary interest would be to pair devices directly with the HE hub. As you may have noticed in one of my other posts, I have some Lightify buttons I would like to get working with HE. But all Lightify devices currently connected directly to HE are responding to ZLL broadcasts which would need to be stopped. Devices connected to the Lightify gateway stop responding to direct ZLL commands which is what I would like the devices to do when they are connected to HE as well.
Lightify has a lan protocol in addition to the Cloud API.
The Lightify gateway listens on port 4000 to a binary protocol ( you can find examples of it on Github ).
FWIW Their IOS can flip between the two protocols.
I'm not sure I see the value in an integration with the lightify bridge. All of their devices are Zigbee ZHA compliant and unless we missed something, virtually the entire product line is supported natively on Hubitat.
If they were all supported I would agree with you. And I would prefer direct integration over the gateway integration.
But, I don‘t think the buttons all work on HE. I have a four button and two button switches that don‘t pair well. Or at least I had the issue that they would still directly effect other Lightify devices although it was paired with HE. When I pair it to ST then ST does something that turns that function off.
Basically the issue I have is that I still have a light bulb with a two button switch that directly turns it on and off. These are not connected to any hub or gateway. If I pair another Lightify switch to HE and push the buttons it also turns my other light bulb on and off. When paired to ST it doesn‘t. Of course I haven‘t tried again with HE in a while, so I don‘t know if this has been fixed in the meantime.
These devices must be factory reset prior to pairing with Hubitat.
The 4 button controller appears to not play well when on the same network as other Zigbee bulbs, I have seen it get into a state where it can take a button press or two for the commands to be seen in Hubitat, on a network without Zigbee bulbs I haven't seen this happen.
I don't know what this problem is about currently.
I can confirm. I use another Hubitat just for my OSRAM light products. If I pair the 4-button switch to this hub, very erratic behavior, such as button 2 and 4 don't register presses, or some buttons will only register release and nothing else. When I removed and paired to the hub without OSRAM lights, it works correctly.
I just connected two bulbs (Sylvania branded BR30's) and they worked just fine. (Too bad the Sylvania branded has faded so much that the spellcheck doesn't recognize it)
The good news is that lightify seems to work and is inexpensive. The bad news is that the range is extremely limited. I'm going to experiment with Zigbee repeaters but it's another reminder of how truly terrible such old school silos are with a repeater for each family - Each Zigbee (Hubitat, Hue etc) and each Z-Wave and thread. Silicon Labs seems to be running a silo factory.
I also have my special hub for Blink (now Ring) and still have a few things paired to Smartthings and ... annoying. At least Hubitat is a point of integration.
I placed a bulb where it worked and then another one further away but less distance then the first bulb to the hub but the second bulb wasn't reachable. I thought each bulb would act like a router for Zigbee. I "solved' that by accepting that some spots are dead zones for Zigbee.
Moving on ... Now that I've got my Lightify BR30's working adequately I want to use the garden lights but I can't seem to control them. Can I connect the Lightify hub and use that to control some of the Lightify devices? Can they share the same Zigbee mesh as other Lightify devices?
Separately I looked at the API but you need to login as an approved developer which is one limit and another may be that it's cloud-based.
For me, this would be valuable. I have six lightify bulbs that can act flaky sometimes, and I think it’s because they are trying to route through one another, not always successfully.
Unfortunately Osram no longer helps users in the US flash the firmware to make the bulbs work with ZLL, if they did I would pair the bulbs to a hue bridge. And AFAIK even though they’re supposed to support zigbee 3.0, it’s still not possible to pair them to a hue bridge in the US.
I'm not seeing zigbee 3.0 as the cure for all issues, the hubs would need to support it firstly, and it's not clear to me how it glues zll, zha , green power and whatever other profiles into something that a single profile can use, or even how it works at that level all...
