I have a deaf teenager and curious if I could use this lamp to color code things, for example, house gets put in a guest mode (does not arm house when presence sensors leave), if a door opens it will turn lamp on to a specific color or possibly flash a few times and then turn off. Or perhaps we can program a button to push and it will alert a color indicating come here. All kinds of possibilities with rule machine.
If I bought this would I need a philips hue hub or can I directly connect to hubitat?
Looking to purchase on amazon: Philips Hue Go White and Color Portable Dimmable LED (Bluetooth & Zigbee) Smart Light Table Lamp, White
That's a pretty cool idea! If your teenager is willing to learn morse code it could get REALLY interesting.
Most hue bulbs can be paired directly with HE but many people purchase a separate hue hub and keep smart bulbs on that rather than on HE. The HE integration with Hue is quite good, and keeping them on a separate zigbee network generally helps overall mesh performance since bulbs make notoriously bad repeaters for non-bulb devices.
Not all the hue bulbs actually change colors - some of them only change temperature, which isn't the same thing.
I actually have the non-portable version sitting downstairs and have not yet plugged it in. I may have to go play with it now.
I have one light in my back room that flashes when the main door is open while im back there. Did it just so i know someone got home and doesn't scare the crap out of me because usually im blasting electronic music when im in the back room because i only go back there to reload ammo.
Keep us updated on your project. It will be interesting knowing if it works.
BTW i was trying to do something like this for my roommate that is in denial of being almost deaf.
But he would not let me do it because I think he doesn't want to admit he is almost deaf. So i stopped researching it.
Knock on wood. 10 year's reloading only 1 squib.
Primer no powder. Of course the day i left at home my cleaning rod so i couldn't shoot that rifle the rest of the day lol
Personally I would avoid Philips hue if you haven't already invested. There products are not great and the price is crazy for that.
Have a look for a competitor product and make sure it's the latter ZigBee 3.0 standard. With those you don't need the additional hue bridge and can join it directly. It's the the Philips hue LL or older model ZigBee LL which you don't want to join direct to the hub.
I have both Sengled and Hue color bulbs. The Sengled bulbs are paired directly to Hubitat. The Hue bulbs are paired to a Hue bridge and integrated with Hubitat.
I prefer the Hue bulbs because in my experience they never drop from the network, they dim lower than Sengled, and the Hue firmware is easily updated. As a backup, I have a few of the Hue remotes so that if Hubitat goes down, I can still control my Hue lights. However, the Hue bulbs do cost more than Sengled.
That's because they are on their own hub. They are just as bad if joined direct. Mine have been better since firmware updates but they are crap compared to my ZigBee 3.0 lamps.
Inner, Ajax, aurora and the new osram lamps have all been much better with the newer ZigBee chips. Best I think are inner and Ajax.
Firmware updates are now possible direct from the hub for all ones that exist and are made available.
The ZigBee 3.0 supports find and bind so you can join a switch to the hub AND the lamp directly. This means it works without the hub.
One of my son's is about 75% deaf. He never heard us until we basically tapped him on the shoulder. I also believe that with the 25% that he does have is impaired with selective teenager hearing. I found that he didn't really pay much attention to a light bulb changing color or even turning on and off. This was especially troublesome when he was playing his games. I did two things that worked really well.
I used a dumb bulb that was incredibly annoying. It worked great. Link at the bottom.
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I built an attention getting light that he couldn't miss. I got a daylight bright led strip and cut-off about a foot of it. I wired it to a 12vdc block and plugged that into a smart plug. The led strip was mounted across the top of his computer monitor. I'm pretty sure it affected his vision, because it would get a passing planes attention.
Good luck. I swear teenagers can ignore the explosion of the sun if they were on the beach. I'm just glad I've only got 2 more to go through the teenage years. The other 6 are pretty much grown now.
I would second the suggestion to consider another brand of zigbee bulbs. Sengled is a great option because they don’t act as zigbee repeaters and that can help avoid some of the problems many people experience when pairing zigbee bulbs directly with their Hubitat hub.
Thank you all for the wonderful feedback. And great thinking about the push notifications.
So far everything works as planned. I have a Philips hue lamp and it turns off and on and repeats. She loves it.
I did notice I cannot use the option to flash the light. I would only turn on. So the solution was to create multiple actions and delays.
One major problem I am having is it completely ignores the light color. Within the device properties I can change light colors and turn it on and that works so if I pick a color there it will not be the color selected in the rule. Not sure if that's a bug or I'm doing it wrong.
Really awesome @atechstl !
I don't have a Phillips lamp, so there might be an easier way. But something what almost always works for me is make a Custom Action Have you tried that?
RM > Action > "set mode, variables or files, run custom action" > Run custom action > (choose your device). You'll get a drop down list with all the actions/settings available. Choose something like SetHue/SetColor > Parameter=number. Choose a number between 0 - 100 (which represent a color).
For anyone else reading this post:
You could also try a Zigbee led strip controller.
Go for an RGBW (RGB+CCT samething) bulb/ledstrip. It has a bigger range of colors.
I can imagine if you gor for a pixel ledstrip (dreamcolor). You can make crazy specific notification.
It would be awesome if there was a driver/app where you can type in a letter/word and the ledstrip will turn that in to morse code. It should be possible.. but I think its not going to be easy and time consuming.
I will give that a try. Here is my current setup. The problem I found is it won't flash the light unless I create multiple rules and add delays. Custom colors set here do nothing. It will use the last color the lamp used.
Not sure, but might this be a driver issue? Have a look at this post Solution:
Add the Driver (don't forget to press Configure after adding the driver).
That's not a Hue Bridge bulb, that's a directly connected Hue bulb via Zigbee. The Generic Zigbee RGBW Light driver would be the appropriate driver for a Hue White and Color bulb connected in this manner. Be sure to click "Configure" after changing to the new driver.
