I keep seeing recommendations to not attach zigbee bulbs directly to the hubitat, but to have them on a secondary zigbee network that is linked to the hubitat through another hub. I have a raspberry pi 4 running homebridge and another app related to hubitat. With a raspbee, this should also be able to act as the secondary hub which sits between my bulbs and the hubitat, right?
I don't need the pi to do any home automation stuff on it's own beyond acting as an interface between the hubitat and zigbee bulb network. What's the best/simplest way to set up the raspberry pi for this purpose?
The typical recommendation is to keep zigbee lamps/bulbs on another hub... yes. This is typically a Hue bridge which is the only one natively supported for this.
The Raspbee/Conbee run with the DeCONZ system and there is no native integration for DeCONZ with HE at this time. (that I'm aware of).
To add the this. I know you already have the pi but not only there's no integration but it's probably easier to get another HE hub and use Hubconnect. You can do so much more for $80 right now.
I don't own a hue bridge, but I'm sure I could find one halfway cheap on ebay if that's the best option. My concern is whether it would pair with all of my bulbs. I had heard/read that not all zigbee bulbs work with a hue bridge. I have mostly Sylvania bulbs, and a few Ikea Tradfri bulbs that I purchased recently but haven't started using yet. Will both of those pair with a hue bridge?
I don't know if all of those would pair with a Hue bridge or not. Like others have suggested another HE hub would work well. And I would toss out the Sylvania bulbs! They are horrible repeaters and will just screw up any mesh you put them on.
There's a deconz add-in for hass.io, which I thought I had seen people talk about integrating with their HE. Is that a viable option, or am I just looking at a big pain in the tush trying to go that route?
Are you a developer? Do you know how to interact with a REST API? If yes go the route of integrating DeCONZ. It's really not that hard and is very similar to the Hue API.
If the answer is no. Then buy another HE hub and be done with it.
Fair enough. While I tinker with some coding here and there, and write a decent powershell script, I wouldn't call myself a developer.
I'm sorry, I'm missing something. Are you saying that even moving the sylvania bulbs off to a dedicated hub they will still cause problems with the other devices?
Those bulbs will cause a problem in whatever zigbee mesh they are in. If you only have bulbs and only bulbs in that mesh you may not even notice it if they are in the same room as the hub.
If you have any other device in that mesh and they pick up the Sylvania bulb as their router then you will hit the same problems we all have had with those bulbs. I don't even think those bulbs work well with each other really....
Thank you for clarifying. I was under the impression that these bulbs were only an issue if they were on the same network as other (non-bulb) devices.
Honestly, I think just the single hubitat hub, without any repeaters, could probably cover my entire house. It might still be worth adding a second hub (whether HE or Hue or whatever) and trying it out. I'll keep this in mind though if I have issues after that.
Doesn't matter which route you will take. It's worth it to keep repeater bulbs on a separate hub for sure. I have Phillips bring bridge for all my Hue/Tradfri bulbs. Got rid most of my Sylvania/Osram except the color bulbs and they are still on my ST hub. Sylvania/Osram bulbs don't work on North America Hue Bridge.
I am slowly replacing my bulbs with Sengled bulbs because they are not repeaters and pair directly to HE hub.
I think we are pointing you to the HE hub because it's much easier to deal with but sounded like you are very capable of going the Pi to HE way. I have no programming background hence the easier recommendation.
Navat - I appreciate the help. I was just wondering whether a second hubitat offered some additional benefit over buying a secondhand hue bridge or similar. It sounds like it does not. I'm going to give the raspbee route a try, but if that proves too much of a hassle I will probably spend $15 to get a hue bridge from ebay rather than a second HE.
You say you got rid of most of your sylvania bulbs, were they problematic for you even on a dedicated hub?
Hey Steve, I've been on HE for only 2 weeks now and have all my GE bulbs on my HE hub. I'm interested after reading your post if you can point me at any of the readings about not adding the bulbs directly to the HE hub... I do have the hue bridge so could move then if needed. Thanks for anything you can provide!
In theory it should work as-is with the Hue Bridge integration on HE ..... deCONZ emulates the Hue API, so it should just be a case of putting deCONZ into authentication mode (via the Phoscan web UI) and searching for Hue Bridges in HE.
(I've not tried this in a long time as I only use HE for ZigBee direct devices now, but it did work earlier in the year)
I had seen a few things suggesting that deconz emulates a hue bridge and tried using the hue integration to connect directly to deconz last night, but while the app installed successfully and detected deconz as a hue bridge, it threw an error after that and wouldn't go past it. I didn't dig into the error much, as I just assumed that it wasn't supposed to work. Knowing that it did work in the past though gives me hope, I'll have to check the logs for that error and try to troubleshoot it tonight.
