Scenes + Hue

I am thinking this is not a bug - but maybe it will be helpful to someone else looking at creating a scene in Groups and Scenes when using Hue Colored lights.

I have 4 lights in my office all are Hue and they are connected to hubitat locally through the Hue hub.

I created 3 different scenes (number doesn't really matter).
I go into Create a new Scene.
I name the scene
I select the 4 bulbs
I then "Capture" scene.

The first time around this works great - it captures all the settings for the bulbs.

Then I change scenes on my hue app to a different scene. Go through the same steps above in Groups and Scenes. But this time when I Capture the settings - they are the settings from the previous scene. So now I have two different scenes in HE but they are the same settings.

What I have come to find out is that you need to wait .. maybe 1 minute +/- to allow the settings from the bulbs to get back to HE so you can capture the scene as it is now.

I looked around and didn't find anything that led to this - but thought it may be helpful to someone else trying to do the same thing - of it is something helpful to the HE folks.

I believe the Hue integration only receives updates from the Hue bridge periodically, not instantly. This is purely based on what I have seen other post in threads previously. I am sure @patrick can confirm one way or another as I believe he uses Philips Hue in his home.

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That is what my take on it is - which is fine - just caused frustration - but once that is figured out it makes it easier.

It would be nice when you hit capture it actually fires off a request to get and update first.

I found the old post from @patrick...

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Maybe the Capture function could be updated to refresh all the devices in a scene before saving. This would ensure any devices that use polling would have the updated values first. @bravenel what do you think?

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The "tl;dr" version that you may have gleamed from the above post (but to save anyone from having to read it all) is that you'll be fine if you manipulate the bulbs from within Hubitat, but it does have to poll Hue periodically to get changes made outside of Hubitat. (I'm not sure how often, but it seems to be under a minute, possibly under 30 seconds.) That means changing to a Hue scene using the Hue app (or Hue + Alexa integration, etc.) will not necessarily reflect instantly in Hubitat.

The workaround: hit "Refresh" on any bulb. Again, any bulb: refreshing one Hue light will refresh them all.

It might be nice to have the "Capture" button automatically do this if the Groups and Scenes app knows that there are any Hue bulbs involved. It adds a bit of complexity to the app, and I understand the desire not to poll too frequently, but since creating and capturing scenes frequently enough to cause problems in this way is extremely unlikely, it might not be a bad idea. :slight_smile:

I was thinking about this, will look at to see...

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