Totally new to Hubitat...in fact, I don't yet have my hub, but I will on Friday.
Quick novice question: can I add/delete/change Hue lights from the Hubitat app, or do I need to do it in the Hue app first? If I need to do it in the app first, I'll go ahead and get started.
We moved recently, and now lamps are in different rooms and bulbs are in different lamps and cats are sleeping with dogs.
The Hue lights need to be setup in the Hue hub first, then imported to Hubitat where they can be setup and used in rules and dashboards.
Welcome to Hubitat!
Exactly what I needed to know. I'll start that process tonight.
(...sigh......I've let the setup get out of date, but that's ok. First world problems and all.)
Thanks, @Sebastien !
I recommend using Cocohue for integration. Also if you have any sensors hooked up to your hue bridge, move those directly to hubitat.
Also take a gander at this post. It will help you avoid some gotchas.
Another happy CoCoHue user here, but in terms of what Hue things you leave on the Hue bridge vs move directly into Hubitat, I'd recommend starting off by leaving everything on the Hue Bridge...
CoCoHue (or Advanced Hue Integration - a similarly popular option) allow you to bring in everything (including sensors and plugs) from the Hue bridge and since that's least disruptive, I'd start there...
If you later decide to directly connect any sensors, bulbs etc, you can always do that at any point down the road.
I have a couple Hue sensors and bulbs directly connected, but the vast majority of my Hue stuff is on the Hue bridge and integrated via CoCoHue.
One big advantage to leaving stuff on the Hue bridge is that you get the Hue firmware updates right away.
Amazing. Thank you for the resource--I've skimmed and will read in detail tonight!
Ok, so your suggestion is get my setup tight on the Hue bridge/app, then do the import? That makes sense, and at our previous home I had an extensive setup managed through the Hue app, so that sounds fine on this end.
The trickiest part will just be figuring out what bulb I'm working with since they all got switched around when the move happened, but minor inconvenience.
Yeah, this is just my $0.02 (and worth that much!), but I'd square away your Hue stuff first at you new place before even firing up your new Hubitat...
I say that just to help keep your transition do-able in smaller bites - after all, Hue's the devil you know, so start there and get it back up-&-running up first. Then dive into the new world of Hubitat.
ETA -- Hubitat has a native/stock Hue integration app too... It's fine, but it lacks some nice additional features that the 2 community integrations offer (CoCoHue and Advanced Hue) -- among other things, the ability to bring in sensors and plugs too.
And that's true of a lot of "native/stock" vs "community" apps and drivers... The native apps & drivers are always intended to be a safe/solid choice, so they often don't include ALL the possible bells-&-whistles -- for many folks, that's perfectly good enough. The community versions help fill in such gaps and add'l features. It's nice to have options!
I may be misreading between the lines, but just in case you are not aware...
There are two main flavours to how people will typically use Hue lights with Hubitat:
Accessories are another thing to consider, again, you will likely get some more of this story as you start to look at Coco-Hue and/or the Advanced Hue Integrations.
I'm probably over complicating things, so it's probably best just to say, I think the other people here have set you on the right path, the same I am on now, but that if you are ever interested, you could consider pairing devices with HE.
For me, I had no knowledge of Coco Hue when I wrote the Advanced Hue Integration. I started out without the Hue Hub. I did not like the way the scenes and transitions worked in HE. I also could not update the device firmware back then, so I bought a Hue Hub because I was experiencing connection issues with the lights not responding. Having received the hub, I tried the built-in integration which did okay, except that it had no support for scenes, and only very basic support for lights and groups.
While using Hue, I found the hub to have a more organic feel. But I also noticed that my Hue devices simply worked. I could use dynamic scenes, 3rd party animations, and I was happy with Hue. But, this also meant that to truly integrate the hub, something better was required. Initially, my goal was to create a basic driver to bring Hue scenes into Hubitat, and to allow for a better solution to refresh device states. This grew into what it is today. I learned about Coco Hue after I published to Hubitat Package Manager and was working on integrating the new Event Stream protocol that Hue was sneaking into their hubs. While working on the issue, the Coco Hue developer and I found each other and collaborated on the solution. Ultimately I went with a slightly different solution and we both managed to get some HE bugs corrected to make our integrations real-time. Since then, I have focused more on integrating features with minimal drivers, and native interfaces where possible (use Hue skill on Alexa, not HE, for example), so that the systems are truly isolated but continue to work together seamlessly.
I find that keeping the 3rd party stuff in their own ecosystem works best. The same happened to me with Ring security devices. I couldn’t use them reliably. I bought their hub, and now they work flawlessly.
The Hubitat is a great hub, but it can’t do everything well. When dealing with 3rd party devices that have their own ecosystem, I find it works best to keep those devices in their own ecosystem. This way you don’t lose any features from switching to HE control, and you free the HE hub up to deal with its own ecosystem better.
That's the big conclusion I'm getting from everyone's feedback. And that's fine, I don't mind the time involved, but knowing the order of operations will obviously save a lot of frustration for me.
I had Home Assistant setup but it just required such constant fiddling that I never felt like I was learning the platform--I was just solving little issue after issue in pursuit of actually using it. So I gave up, but never could figure out if HA preferred for devices with their own ecosystem to be integrated directly or not.
Anyway, hoping HE will have the right balance for me, and am figuring out how to minimize any frustration. Appreciate all your info here!
Yup! I'm going to use the Hue app as the entry point and then pull everything into HE. I suspect I'll have special use cases, like funky setups for Halloween, where I'll HE directly. Otherwise, for baseline, sticking with the Hue app. Appreciate the info!
I looked at HA and realized why do I need another universal automation tool — that what HE is for. So I removed it. For me, I use HE as my integration and rules engine.
I was on the fence on whether or not to use a Hue Hub. I already have a Caseta Hub, a Smart Things hub, why do I want another one? That helps to answer my question. I don't thing things have changed much in the last four years.
(p.s. I still have my SmartThings mostly historical as everything was working fine and didn't want to port every over to Hubitat. I also try all new stuff on Hubitat and if it really doesn't work well, I fall back to SmartThings.).
I have hue, lutron, and Hubitat. I use the Hue for zigbee 1.2zll bulbs and that's it. Works fine and is 100% local. Nothing wrong with having multiple hubs. No one hub does it all but as long as the can talk to hubitat cleanly and locally that's all you have to worry about. As for failure, I've never personally see a Lutron or Hue bridge go bad. Mainly because they're embedded.
Bought the Hue hub. Everything seems to be playing well together!
Using built in integration or cocohue? I recommend cocohue as it is more full featured..It also supports hue scenes.
Download the Hubitat app
