Phillips hue buttons

Advanced Hue Integration also includes pushing of accessory device commands, for those accessories connected to the Hue bridge

1 Like

What i actually want to do, is, when the hue lights are turned on manually via the switch, i want HE to suspend the motion app rule for that room and then when turned of manually for the rule to be resumed.
I can i think get alexa to flip a virtual switch which might make it all work, but i really want to keep away from cloud integrations because of my unreliable innerweb connection.

I wil switch to coco, there doesnt seem to be a downside for doing so.

It sounds like the advanced hue integration would do what you want with button presses pausing the ML rule.

2 Likes

Ok ill use that instead of CoCo then!

2 Likes

I haven’t used Advanced Hue, but @armand probably has that info on [Release] Advanced Hue Bridge Integration

1 Like

Maybe. When using Dimmers and button controllers on HE to drive the hue lights, the dimming will be slow and awkward. The Hue hub can only receive 10 updates per second for bulbs, and 3 updates per second for groups. Additionally, the last I worked with the built-in integration, the actions to begin dimming and stop dimming weren’t supported. You had to use something like mirror me to control the dimming of the hue lights. This results in a lot of overloaded commands hitting the hue hub and not very smooth lighting transitions.

With my hue integration, and I believe CoCo hue does it too, we implement the dimming up/down commands, so a button controller on He can instruct the hue device to begin raising or lowering the brightness and to stop at the desired time.

But if you pair the hue sensors directly to the Hue hub, you get the benefit of their very fluid and seem less integration, with the added benefit of being able to also trigger He events when the sensor events occur. In addition, I have found that although I can now use my hue dimmers in He, it mostly use the zone or lights in HE and let hue manage the association between the dimmer and the lights. For instance, in my office, I have two hue color bulbs. On my wall I have an Invelli dimmer, so I can turn the lights on and off, and I can control brightness from the Inovelli dimmer but whil I am sitting at my desk, I tend to use a hue dimmer which is paired to the lights via a hue zone (office lights). I can raise and lower the lights in a fluid, organic feeling way, that does not feel like there is any automation in play. By HE hub receives the lighting zone’s brightness updates and uses that to sync up my Inovelli dimmer’s level. So whenever I use the hue dimmer, everything is smooth and seem less. When I use the wall dimmer it’s slow but still functional, and none of this requires the hue dimmer talk to the He hub. While at the same time I could still write rules on the hub that are triggered by the hue dimmer.

So, yes, you can pair the dimmer directly to He, but if you use the hue hub, the dimmers work best when paired to the hue hub. It really comes down to how your system is built. If all hue sensor are paired to the He thenI would question why even use the hue hub? Just pair the bulbs directly to HE too.

2 Likes

Thanks, i have changed over to your app and will play with it, the general advice is never to put hue bulbs on the HE so i didnt. all of my motion sensors are connected directly to HE and work well. as your app allows switches to be use by HE i will add all of the switches to the hue and use your app to make the HE actions.
all rooms have both motion and switches, i just wanted the switch to pause/start the motion ruel when on/off so i had the best of both worlds.

Everyone’s needs are different. And all three hue solutions are different. You can certainly use a hue bulb directly on HE. The benefit of hue hub is the organic feel …. The way lights transition from one state to another…

Let me know if you need support for any new devices. Happy to work on integrations not already in my code. I am presently working on a rotary dimmer for hue to add support for that device type. And I will soon be modifying my sensor support so the multi-sensors are a single multi/sensor device once I get them converted to the v2 API.

3 Likes

That would be great. These work so beautifully on Hue, but I have one room with bulbs on Hue and HE that this functionality would make more synchronous; and I'm not enamored with the way they work on HE with groups of bulbs.

The best way to use a rotary dimmer on hue is to let it control a zone and use the zone to control HE… to control HE via a hue dimmer use a bit wonky… but it is possible… my rotary dimmer is on back order but I should have it in the next few days according to Best Buy. Once I have it I should be able to integrate support for it within a day or two..

Right now I’m controlling a Hue zone of 8 Hue CT bulbs with an aurora rotary dimmer, then using one of the Hue bulbs’ dimmer level change as a RM trigger that an HE light group of 3 Zigbee lights then follows. This works pretty well, with just about a second or two of delay, but it would be nice if it was more in sync with the Hue group. I hope you’re able to bring this into HE, since it isn’t a Philips device.

I just received the dimmer. I am collecting the data I need to validate it's behavior. Bringing in the dimmer as a device that HE can understand won't make this any better though. In your case, the best solution will be to create an HE group with the 3 zigbee lights. For the HE group, turn on Enable Zigbee Group Messaging. Then create a mirror me rule to mirror the Hue Zone / Group to the HE Group.

This is almost exactly what I was doing in my kitchen / living room. I tried all sorts of solutions, but once I enabled Hue v2 event stream, this is the solution that works most seamlessly. When you adjust the brightness of the zone, HE receives an event with the new brightness, and adjusts the zigbee group.

In my case, I was using my HE to integrate Osram / Sylvania Lightly lights with my Hue Lighting controller.

Still, if you wish to experiment the dimmer should be available in a soon to be released update. Maybe 2-3 days now that the weekend is here, and I have family to entertain this weekend.

Now, I just need to figure out how to remove the mounting plate from the dimmer w/o breaking the whole thing... this is a delicate dimmer.

That’s exactly what I did at first, but ended up ditching mirror me for a simple RM rule that is smoother, since I don’t want CT mirrored, and that’s not an option with mirror me.

It takes much less force than it seems to take on and off. Whatever you do, don’t mash it back on or you will be doing surgery on it.

Trying to make a rule that pauses another app when the lights are turned on by the phillips switch but i cant find the switches listed in the basic rule app device list. can some one point me in the right direction please?
i have added the switches via the app and they appear in the main device list just not in the switch list in the rule app.

It’s not a switch. It’s a button device.
I wonder what causes the delay between the Hue bridge and HE. It’s not long, but noticeably slower than the speed they have controlling devices on the bridge. That delay doesn’t seem to be there going from HE to Hue.

So, I finally got time to tinker with the rotary dimmer. The v1 API published the dimmer as two separate devices, a push button, and a rotary dial. As such, I won't be supporting this device until I get the v2 API all setup, since the V2 API collects these two devices as a single grouped device which enables me to make a single device to support the rotary dimmer, rather than having to create two.

V2 API is taking me longer than I would like, because it is vastly different. But please consider using the device it controls on Hue as your automation trigger, as it will still be the better solution even if I had the device supported today.

1 Like

That’s what I have been doing. It probably works just as well this way.

Sounds good.

Hey everyone! Thanks for chatting through which approach works best for the rotary dimmers. I've been having a hard time creating rules in HE that complement the Lutron Aurora Smart dimmer that I have. Very reassuring to hear that it's not a "me" problem. Seems like the best approach is to use the dimmer directly through the hue bridge. Is this still the case? What if I'd like to control other groups of lights that aren't hue? Any suggestions?