I learned about the Hubitat elevation C8 on Youtube and consider buying and trying one.
For me it is still unclear what it can do for me and how it will change and improve my smart home environment.
My current setup:
1 Hue bridge with many plugs, bulbs, motion sensors and smart buttons connected. Obviously I hit the modest memory/device-number limits of the bride as I cannot add any new motion sensor without messing up an existing one.
Several Echos, including Echo 4 with build in ZigBee Hub. I have many routines running in that Alexa environment that use ZigBee devices connected to Hue and others connected directly to the Echo 4.
Questions at the moment:
If I migrate to the Hubitat hub, can I get rid of the Hue bridge in the end? Can hubitat do all the things the Hue bridge could do for me (like e.g. have rooms and zones, control light and motion sensitivity of the motion sensors or define a sequence of 6 szenes for the smart button)?
Will I end up with a new mix of Hue, Alexa and Hubitat (what might be even more confusing as my current setup) or will I rather have connected all ZigBee devices to the Hubitab hub, get rid of the Hue bridge and integrate Alexa somehow?
What will be the benefit, what the limitations? Thanks in advance...
Essentially you'd keep the hue hub around for any zll 1.2 bulbs, everything else should pair with hubitat directly. The reason being is zigbee zll 1.2 make terrible repeaters so don't play well on the same mesh as ZHA (sensors and whatnot). So it's recommended you isolate ZLL 1.2 stuff on a Hue bridge or another hubitat. The exception to this are Sengled bulbs as they do not repeat and zigbee 3.0 bulbs get along with everyone.
Older hue and osram are going to be 1.2, You should be able to look at the specs on innr's web site to find if they are 1.2 or 3.0. If they're plugs, it's fine because they are ZHA. Those can pair directly to hubitat. You only want to worry about bulbs... BTW, ZLL is Zigbee Light Link, and ZHA is Zigbee Home Automation
Do you know which generation of bulbs Phillips switched to the newer zigbee spec? I just did some searching. I found the differences between models, even looked at the FCC reports but I'm not finding anything on which version of the zigbee spec each generation follows.
[EDIT]
According to this website, 2018 they moved to ZHA 3.0 from ZLL. Even the newest bulb is 2016, so I guess all bets are off what it uses.
I've always heard it's best to not pair hue bulbs directly since they don't repeat well. I'm assuming that only applies to the 1.2 bulbs.
Correct, older ones. New ones should be 3.0 though.. From what I'm gathering, the 3.0 bulbs from hue came around 2019... or so You can use zigbee2mqtt to see the stack version...
Unless they are like 5+ years old this will be 3.0. they did release some very early LL lamps but they quickly updated to ZB3.0 on all their products.
Again depends on age but there was a lot more LL of these.
It's not quite as simple as them being 3.0 and they will be ok. It's not actually about the version it's about its buffers basically old lamps (which were LL) were only designed to route and handle LL traffic. So then when they are put on a HA 1.2 hub or more which is designed to work with more complex stuff they fall over and drop messages.
So a firmware update may not fix that.
However device which were designed around 3.0 as they are supposed to work with all are capable of dealing with a better network.
However this still depends on the manufacturer, crap is still crap. There are some cheap Chinese device which are supposed to be ZigBee 3.0 however they only reliably work on their own hub.
In my experience though the innr lamps have been one of, if not the best out there they are feature rich and have been very reliable.
So in your case a C8 would simplify things you could move all the good stuff to the c-8 any old lamps would be left or put on the Philips hue bridge. This can then be directly connected to the hub with a built in app. That will bring the devices into HE as if they were joined directly.
Then you expose everything to the echos if you wish. Do all the automation in HE which will be like what you currently have on steroids. All simple and in one open system bringing it all to one place.
Thank you Boris.
It turns out I only got about 5 older Hue (LL-)lamps. The rest ist innr and Hue with a B(luetooth).
Maybe I just replace the old bulbs with recent ones and shut down the Hue hub..
I wouldn't want to to run three hubs (Echo, Hue and Hubitat).
Still haven't completely understood the issue with the old ZLL devices.
Would they corrupt the mesh build by the Hubitat and the Zigbee 3.0 devices or would they just don't participate in the repeating. The C8 is said to have an exceptional range, so it should reach all the devices in my house even without any repeater.
I have currently no range issues with the Hue hub and the Alexa hub, so I shouldn't have such issues with the C8 at all.
Correct thinking or am I missing something?
The issue is that zll 1.2 bulbs make bad repeaters and messengers and will generally hose a net that has zha devices in it (sensors and what not). So the general rule is to keep zll 1.2 bulbs on their own mesh. Zigbee 3.0 bulbs don't have this issue and sengled bulbs don't either because sengled doesn't repeat. Keep using the Hue bridge and use Cocohue to integrate
Adding a lot of Zigbee bulbs (even Zigbee 3.0 models) will change the behavior of your HE Zigbee mesh. My advice would be not to do it, and continue using the Hue bridge.
Hue bridge is designed to handle all kinds of Zigbee bulbs and does its job great. IMO the benefits of the simplification of your smart home architecture are not worth the risk of changing it, if all is working OK at the moment.
Thank you.
Unfortunately the Hue hub can only manage a certain low number of sensors, rules, bulbs ... and it seems I came to that limit. That's why I was considering to invest in an C8.
Yes, the Hue bridge limitations are fairly well understood. What I would recommend, along the same lines as @kkossev, is to keep the Hue bridge with only your zigbee bulbs attached to it. You should be able to move most outlets, motion sensors, etc... (from both the Hue bridge and Amazaon Echo) over to the Hubitat hub.
I have a Hubitat C8 hub with a bunch of Zigbee outlets, motions sensors, door/window sensors, and leak sensor paired directly to the Hubitat hub.
I have a Hue bridge with a bunch of Hue bulbs paired to it.
I have Lutron Caseta SmartBridge Pro2 with about 70 Caseta switches, dimmers, fan controllers, and Pico remotes paired to it.
Hubitat has built-in integrations to bring in all of the Hue bulbs and Lutron Caseta devices into it's platform, and thereby allows for all sorts of automations to be created.
I have a bunch of Amazon Echo devices throughout the house, using the Hubitat Alexa Skill, which allows all of these devices to be used via voice control.
In general, I have found that using these subsystems, tied together via Hubitat, to be the most stable, reliable, and performant home automation solution.
Yes this is the simple way to tell although I think I remember talking to one of the engineers who said it's not fully true. There was so that fell through the net I can't remember if this was they could be 3.0 even without a QR or the other way round but I think you would be unlucky either way if it effected you.
I think it was to do with what was on the box .
What they are saying is you would remove everything from that hub apart from the old lamps so that would free you up.
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