I am thinking a lot about my light situation and the zigbee mesh strength. the hue bridge still annoys me, but I guess I will live with it.
But I saw a lightstrip controller with zigbee 3. Would this still mess with my zigbee mesh like zll stuff when paired directly to HE?
The point is that the whole mesh would massively improved when the light system could be integrated.
Woud appreciate your thoughts...
PS what about something purely whit zha protocol? would that interfere with the HE mesh regarding signal repeating?
Hubitat doesn't support Zigbee 3.0. It supports Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA). Zigbee 3.0 devices can join ZHA networks just fine. Z3.0 devices are intended to be backwards compatible with ZHA networks. That said, that means that the device could be supported on the network, not that Hubitat will know what commands to issue to the device to get it to do anything. If you know what commands are necessary and are savy with groovy, you could write your own driver if one of the native drivers doesn't work.
Something that only supports ZHA will work perfectly on HE and repeat just fine. What you want to avoid are ZLL (Zigbee Lite Link) devices. ZLL is a "lighter" (forgive the pun) version of the Zigbee communication protocol. While these devices repeat for other ZLL devices just fine, they attempt to repeat for ZHA devices but end up crapping out and dropping the message. Think of it this way, your mailman gets tired half-way through his route so he just throws half the letters he's carrying in the garbage. So, stick with ZHA devices and your mesh will be fine.
Not necessarily... Hubitat’s ‘Generic Zigbee Zigbee RGBW Light’ driver might just work fine with that device. You’ll probably need to manually assign the correct driver after pairing it, and then click CONFIGURE on the device details page. It’s worth a try, unless others have already tried and failed. I was able to pair the recently released Sengled RGBW LED strip to my hub, and assigned it the driver mentioned above, and it works fine.
The real question is, will you be really pissed if you're out the $21.50 if it doesn't work? Or do you want to pick something that you're sure will work that might be more expensive? There are other cheap RGBW controllers out there that are known to work with HE. Might want to search the forum here for some of those.
I just looked at this listing again...it appears that it does pair with Phillips Hue, so the odds of it responding to standard commands is extremely high.
You could do a cheap set of LED lights and then plug it into a paired Zigbee plug. The mess would still be improved. The next question would be what kind of control are you looking for. I did it for the lights behind my TV. I'd rather not have changing colors so it worked really great for me.
If your in the USA check out the RGBgenie stuff this is ZigBee 3.0 but although 3.0 isn't supported on HE these devices are already supported or are coming.
Yep... my point is not to get another light per se. I want to use lights that help improve the zigbee mesh. In my opinion the whole zigbee stuff is ment to build one solid mesh... and the lights, which are normaly all over the place, are an essential part of it.
If you think about it, if you have all or most of your lights replaced with hue (or compatible) bulbs, you have most certainly never problems with responding because of the strong mesh... you won't have those big distances between, every few meters is at least one bulb. Other stuff like plugs and sensors (wich aren't repeaters anyway) is more spread out. At least in my case
(Of course, it depends on your home... but in a normal one story flat it works that way).
Some of these, and I do not know about this one, only support zigbee color commands using xy color points vs the more typical hue and saturation commands.
All of our drivers currently only send hue and saturation. The Ikea bulbs also only support xy.
We will be adding specific drivers for specific devices that only support xy. The RGBgenie controllers will be the first of these to be released, there is no release schedule for these right now, but they are being worked on.
