Tradfri Bulbs on Hue not changing Colors

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1

Hi everyone,

Just got my Hubitat today and getting my hue bridge migrated over. I'm running 3 RGB Tradfri bulbs that have no issues being controlled by Hue and the Hue app. Hubitat is able to turn the light on and off along with adjusting brightness but it cannot change the color. The lights are set as RGB Bulbs and I'm using the default Hue App in Hubitat. Any ideas on what could be causing this?

2

This is a weakness of the Trådfri color bulbs. Hubitat's color model is HSV/HSB (or hue/saturation for color on the Zigbee/Hue side of things), but Tradfri bulbs implement only XY color. They do not report or respond to hue/saturation colors. The Hue app supports both, and it's not clear to me whether Zigbee requires implementing both, but all other bulbs I know of do.

I know there's a community driver for directly-paired (to Hubitat) Trådfri bulbs that does something like using preset x/y values for specific colors. I'm not aware of anything for Hue Bridge bulbs. I'm working on something for that in my custom Bridge integration, but this conversion is quite difficult to do reliably (for real-world color representation, at least; I can get it working mathematically in both directions, but it doesn't match what the bulbs actually produce in "xy" vs. "hs" mode).

(Or if you just want a short explanation: there's just an incompatibility between the color models used between the bulbs and Hubitat, and Trådfri bulbs are odd in that they implement only one specific color model that happens to be the one Hubitat doesn't use, and I'm not aware of any good workarounds at the moment.)

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3

Thanks for the amazing explanation. That makes perfect since. Now to convince She who must be obeyed that we need new bulbs >:)

4

If it's only 3, I doubt pairing directly to Hubitat would do any harm

6

IKEA Tradfri color bulbs do respond to color name change. In my case I have even defined a new color in the device driver, for it to match the CT bulbs that complete the lighting in the same space (it is the only color bulb for specific purposes).