A good point. Thank you for that. 
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Challenging, but challenge accepted 
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Nope. Nothing aggressive at all... 2ndchanceor made a statement that was incorrect. I corrected it.
Dont. Any Zigbee device with access to constant power should be repeating. After a few years of home automation, I have mutated and transformed my solution many times as I continue to grow it out. I have reached the belief that all smart lights must be Zigbee and paired to a Hue hub. The hue hub can then be linked to Hubitat. All control of the hue lights are from Hubitat (don't use Hue's Alexa app, etc).
Why? Because I learned that not all lights behave the same. Some return to last state when powered on, some go to 100% when powered on. Some will turn off when set to level 0, and turn on when set to any non-zero level. Others require the switch state be set. With hue, I can send all my state information, but if I don't turn them on, they stay off. This means I can stage a scene, then turn the lights on and they transition from off to the desired state. With Sylvania Lightify, they first turned on to last state, then changed to desired state. With MonoPrice Z-Wave lights, it was an utter disaster. The GE+Link bulbs worked great, but they are dimmers only, no CT nor RGB, so that is expected, but these work exceptionally well on Hue as well.
For motion sensors, I have decided the only ones that reliably perform to my satisfaction and still have great battery life are the Hue motion sensors. Being battery powered, they do not relay the signals.
For switches, and dimmers, and the like, I prefer Z-Wave Plus device (only). This means, in my setup, if my lights are not repeaters, then my range is always limited to the range to my hub.
So, I recommend all bulbs be repeaters.
[Edit] Fixed grammatical errors, and clarified some of my thoughts.
[Update] I have only two WiFi smart devices: A power strip, and a TV mood light. Both were purchase at the same time, and neither work with HE automation due to their reliance on the Tuya SmartLife service. They can be made to work, if one wants to invest the time and extensive research to try an flash them with new firmware -- not my preference. But WiFi is an inadequate solution for smart devices. The WiFi network has a node limit of around 75 devices for home wifi access points after which performance starts to suffer noticeably. So I generally stay away from WiFi for anything other than TVs, and other bridged solutions. -- YMMV
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That sounds great in theory. Hue does not support all type of Zigbee bulbs. An example is Sage bulbs. (I got tons of these for next to nothing at an auction) Also the Sage bulbs are repeaters, that do a horrible job at repeating. Since they do not pair with the Hue hub, and made the mesh a disaster when paired to the HE, I had to move them back to SmartThings. I need to bite the bullet and get a second HE hub if I want to do this right. If these bulbs were not repeaters my automation and move to HE would have been magnitudes of times better and easier.
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Custom firmware and set all the bulbs the same for the win. MQTT control for world domination.
Findin[quote="digitydogs, post:113, topic:34681"]
Custom firmware and set all the bulbs the same for the win. MQTT control for world domination
[/quote]
Updating Zigbee devices to custom firmware is not always possible, nor easy. I have a hard enough time finding firmware updates for Z-Wave devices, and have been unsuccessful finding anything to make my life easier with Zigbee. But let's assume I did update the firmware, how might this solve the state transition issue? With Hue, my GE+Link bulbs can be commanded to a set brightness, and then turned on. It will not go back to 100% then adjust down. All the SMART+ Zigbee bulbs I have tried behave the same, as expected, the Hue hub will handle the sequencing of the instructions so the bulb transition from off to desired state. It makes it simple. Those same bulbs on HE do not work like this as smoothly.
I love to experiment and find better alternatives, so if you have suggestions, please share. I don't mind throwing $30 or $40 down to test a new device or two. My pile of throw aways is growing. I have yet to try the Eria, but have tried generic LED lighting controllers with hue with great success.
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On my bulbs (over 64 of them) with custom firmware i can adjust the behaviors so all the bulbs act the same at all times. I can set if they turn on or not before a state change, i can set if they retain levels when turned on or not, i can even set the color name values and brightness/dimmer range on them to ensure that when i set the lights to green or 50% they are the exact same brightness and color (or as near as the human eye can tell anyway)
I can even tell the bulbs to always use a fade between states if i want, so issuing a color or dimmer change will always result in fading to that by default, or not to.
I think I am a bit of an odd man out, I'm using WIFI bulbs, so i can't recommend a zigbee bulb that can be flashed, BUT i believe Tasmota does support some Zigbee devices so check out the Tasmota supported list and some of your bulbs may already be on it.
Beyond that you'll have to hope someone else could point you in the direction of info on zigbee and flashing as I'm still looking into if there is anyway short of a ST hub to be able to reflash/update my iris devices.
I would have put a like, but none left today.
The zigbee support in Tasmota is as a controller. So not the same.
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Correct. But Hue has opened their hub to work with more devices. Hue traditionally required Zigbee Light Link, whereas some others chose to use Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA). Today, Hue supports Zigbee 3.0 (which is backward compatible with ZLL). SMART+ is supposed to be Zigbee 3.0 and ZLL compliant. But, Sylvania does something to their SMART+ to prevent usage in Hue hubs. I haven't managed to get those two to talk, but what is clear is the party blocking the integration is Osram, not Hue.
Point is, as long as the bulb is SMART+, Zigbee 3.0, or Zigbee Light Link, it will work with Hue provided it was not produced by OSRAM.
This is what I understand the issue to be. I tried working with OSRAM and Sylvania, but they play dumb. Hue on the other hand recommended all sorts of way to try and force the lights to pair up. Given where my home automation is today, I will only use Zigbee 3.0 bulbs, and only those that work with Hue.
Now I understand the context of your MQTT reference. Makes total sense in a Wifi device setup.
That you use WiFi is the key. Zigbee bulbs is where my issue is, and what I was addressing. I have considered flashing my one Tasmota LED light strip that is a TV mood light. But it is less work to just replace it with a Zigbee one and call it a day. 
Hey man,
Thatâs really interesting. Are you creating the firmware yourself ?!!
Can you please explain how are you getting âcustom firmwareâ into Zigbee lights ???
Does anyone know of any Zigbee bulbs using CC2530 or the newer model I can't remember the number of right now? Those could potentially be flashed with custom firmware since the toolkit is available.
I'm not, i'm using Wifi bulbs. Missed the part where he specified zigbee when skimming the thread.
Ah, ok. Though thatâs somewhat disappointing because if youâd somehow cracked open the Zigbee device firmware youâd really be onto something. LOL
ATSAMR21E which you find in Cree bulbs, for example, should be flashable with a firmware built on Riot OS. There is no such thing readily available as far as I know, but it is possible and would be cool. It would be fun if someone put the time in and does that.
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The current Smart+ bulbs available in the US arenât zigbee 3 and wonât be. The newest, available only in Europe apparently, are zigbee 3 and advertised to work with Hue. The firmware of these starts with 00103 instead of 00102. I found this out on the European Sylvania/LEDvance website.
Exactly. Not the fault of Hue. Deceptive marketing by Sylvania. Point is, Hue is as compatible as can be expected, but not all Zigbee is the same. Still, of all the Zigbee hubs I have tried, HE included, Hue manages Zigbee bulbs the best in my opinion.
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"Alexa, good night!" does this for me - every night. And it's an omnipurpose sensor to boot:
- Alexa, good morning!
- Alexa, lock the front door
- Alexa, set foyer chandelier to 50%
- Alexa, turn on the Keurig
- Alexa, turn on The Boston Channel
- etc.
And of course, Siri can do pretty much the same things...it's all just a simple matter of software. To the original point of this thread, once you get over your resistance to the clunkyness, the platform is extremely customizable...
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After looking at that typo for over a month I snapped and had to edit the title.
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