Last few days I was having struggles to get all of my Philips Hue devices working properly on my Homey Pro 2023. I tried using the Philips Hue, without the bridge community application and the official Philips Hue, with bridge application made by Athom.
But I had two issues:
The community app is made by a single developer. I think a lot of people are very thankful for his work, but sadly the app didn’t meet my needs. At the moment of writing it does not support the Hue Wall Switch Module and I’m having red alert issues with my motion sensors.
The official Hue App made by Athom that uses the Hue Bridge has it’s own very big issue. That’s the way it listens for activities of Hue devices. It polls for changes every 2 seconds for the motion sensors and Wall Switch Modules. This results in having the feeling everything is sluggish. So this neither is a good option.
Now, yesterday I found some kind of a work-around. It’s not very pretty but it for sure works faster (than the official app) and as it looks now more reliable (in comparison with the community app).
How I did this is by using Home Assistant and the Home Assistant community app. I’ve red on the forums here that Home Assistant has a near real-time integration with the Hue Bridge. This means that when there is movement or I push a button Home Assistant knows this near instant. Instead of Homey that polls each 2 seconds and in the worst case knows after 2 seconds there was movement or a button pushed.
I added the Hue Bridge to my Home Assistant installation and added my Home Assistant installation to my Homey. So when I push a button the following happens:
Push the button that is connected to the Hue Wall Switch Module → Zigbee signal to Hue Bridge → Signal to Home Assistant → Signal to Homey.
This combination works faster than using the official Hue app that connects to the Hue Bridge because you eliminate the polling that Homey does and replace it with near instant integrations.
Yes, the “official” Homey app is depressingly slow. If they only open-sourced their drivers, it’d be so much easier for the community to help support and develop these things.
I’ve started writing my own driver, which actually uses the Hue bridges, which I’ll package and release if it ever gets stable (finished!) enough…
Awesome @alistair ! Would love to test your app when almost stable
I would like to get rid of Home Assistant, but also my ATAG One thermostat runs through Home Assistant to my Homey so only when that also get’s a good integration I’ll be able to turn off HA.
I had same issue with the 20 or so Philips Hue motion sensors being not consistently responsive due to the polling nature (every 2s) of Homeys official Philips Hue app.
I do nothing with the HA setup other than running it on a R-Pi and using the Hue motion sensors from HA in my Homey flows. I can confirm it’s faster. BTW I am using Hue bridges to reach the sensors and as per other posts I would not pair sensors directly without the bridge app.
Question: you refer/link to the Home Automation community app and not the official Home Automation app (v0.5.0) I am using. They happen to have the same name in the store. Can you reconfirm which of the two you are using?
Here’s some good news from Athom today be it without timeline or if it covers all models:
We are sorry to hear about your frustration about the polling interval of the philips Hue app. But I have some good news. I’ve talked to development about this and they have said there will be an update in the near future that removes polling for motion sensors entirely and will work on the eventstream principle making them respond much faster! So this is already in the works since we’ve also noticed this issue!
