Philips Hue with or without Hue Hub?

Apps
21

Or use the app https://apps.athom.com/app/name.klep.transitions

2 Likes
22

other than the additional functionalities that the hub offers, could anyone relate to unreliable lights?
I have recently renovates my house. For the living room and open kitchen i have 8 GU10 ambient + color 5 in the living room and 3 above the kitchen. All directly connected with Homey. Until now i have controlled them directly with the homey app for testing, as well as with the Philips hue dimmer switch.

Somehow there is always one light that would not go on, go off, or change color if iā€™d group them in a flow. As it needs to be 100% reliable i made a second action within the on/off flow to re-do the complete ON or OFF flow after 1 second to ensure that if one light stays behind, it will go out the second time. Now out of 10 times, 6 times this still doesnt work. Iā€™ts just dramatic. Homey is located at approx 2,5 meters from the first hue. each hue is approx 50CM apart. first kitchen hue is approx 4 meter away.

Would the hub provide a better change on stability here?

iā€™m aware that they will no longer create a mesh for my other Tradfriā€™s in the house.
I have approx 25 warm white GU10ā€™s spots around the house.

anyone who could give me some tips here. Or maybe tell if this sounds similar to something they have had?

23

This is quite a common issue with Homey: controlling multiple bulbs within a single flow is hit-or-miss. A workaround that is commonly used is to add a delay between each action card, so the first bulb will be switched, then after one second the second bulb, then after one second the third bulb, etc.

I think using the Hue bridge will improve that a lot, provided that it supports (Zigbee-)grouping of devices (I donā€™t have a Hue bridge so I donā€™t know if it supports that, but I canā€™t imagine it doesnā€™t) so you can switch entire groups on/off with one command.

1 Like
24

in my opinion this seems to be a standard feature for a all-in one domotics systemā€¦?
would it change if i went to ā€˜ā€˜apparatenā€™ā€™ and activate / de-activateā€™ā€™ all lights instead of mentioning each light in the flow?

i know thereā€™s also an option to ā€˜ā€˜groupā€™ā€™ lights, but at this point i dont have internet in my new home yet thus cant install it.

25

why not repeat the off all lights card with a delay. Thatā€™s what I do to make sure nothingā€™s left out and the second repeat always picks up whatever that may have been left behindā€¦

26

I agree with that opinion.

You could try. The issue is that Homey cannot handle sending a lot of (Zigbee) commands in parallel, and I donā€™t know if (de-)activating all lights works like that. In contrast, when using proper Zigbee groups, a controller only has to send a single command and all devices in the group will receive it.

27

Is this still the same with the now stable v5 / upgraded zigbee engine? Or can i.e. 4 spots in a room be grouped properly now and dimmed simultaneously?

28

From what I know, v5 doesnā€™t support proper Zigbee grouping, so you still need to switch the separate devices from flows. Perhaps that works better now in v5, but I donā€™t know.

29

I have no experience of using Hue with Athom Zigbee but I control more than 60 Hue bulbs, 25 of which in one room (kitchen), using Athom Hue via Bridge. This solution works very fast and smoothly when scenes are set up in the Hue app. All lights in the scene work smoothly and as you would want. I have tried using a grouping app and using athom to set bulb colours and dim values without using scenes in Hue and the results are very poor. Problem actually scales in that the more you ask Homey to do, more bulbs, the worse it seems to get. And the effected bulbs are almost random. It was really bad in my kitchen. The Hue bridge seems to have no trouble grouping.

1 Like
30

The grouping app on Homey is just a convenience, but it doesnā€™t implement proper Zigbee grouping and still requires Homey to command each device in the group separately. Which Homey is just not very good at, it just seems to lose commands at random so you get random results each time :frowning:

1 Like
31

I havenā€™t tried it yet for speakers but I imagine group app is very useful for this, or a few devices not lots. It certainly provides useful functionality that Homey does not have and saves having to create multiple action cards

32

Have to say that the one day experience I have with 5.0.0. the light grouping (with group app) works now, at least much better.

When pressing grouped lights device the response is quite fast and all lights go on at the same time. Something must have changed.

Time will tell if this is permanent or just a coincident.

1 Like
33

I gave it a go as well, 1 out of 4 spots did not want to pair (after resetting it several times). So I tried the other 3 and over here I still noticed delays between the 3 of themā€¦so I moved them back to deConz and will look for other peoples experiences.

But as @robertklep mentioned, apparently itā€™s grouping the devices in the interface / for convenience. Itā€™s not grouping them in a Zigbee group that is addressed once, itā€™s sending (in my case) 3 requests to 3 devices simultaneously. So as long thatā€™s the case, it probably will not improve.

Iā€™ve asked for Zigbee grouping (and scenes) here: Zigbee Groups & Scenes Ā· Issue #64 Ā· athombv/node-zigbee-clusters Ā· GitHub. Hopefully it will be picked up some day?

1 Like
34

There are 2 apps for Homey. One with hue hub (Athom) and one without hue hub (community). Can anyone tell what the pros and cons? I know the pro for without is that it is without the hub, but the con is than that the updates for devices doesnā€™t work. And also a con with the hub is that I than have 2 zigbee networks. I have several aqara sensors and, as far as I know, they canā€™t be connected to the hue hub.

PS: I searched on this question but didnā€™t find anything.

35

The Pro for the one with the Hue hub is that it uses the Hue hub. Now before that response causes annoyance I have tried the Hue without hub briefly, was alright. Using the Hue hub has been my setup for some time and it works very fast, gives access to Hue hub features such as scenes that are easy to trigger in Homey. Itā€™s fast and responsive

1 Like
36

And if you use the Hue bridge, you always have a backup if Homey failsā€¦

1 Like
37

Very true and sometimes it is mor convenient to use the Hue phone app anyway

38

Homey has a limit of zigbee devices it can support.

My number of Hue bulbs exceeded that limit.

I used the Athom Philips Hue App, it caused a lot of issues crashing the Homey. Athom support are aware of the issue, and advise frequent App resets. I got down to restarting the app every 3 hours to avoid the crashes.

This issue does not impact all users, but some. It seems to be related to the number of Hue Hubs/devices.

I have installed the MQTT client, stopped using the Hue App and drive lights/motion sensors through MQTT/Node Red and Homey is much more stable and happy.

While doing this discovered zigbee2mqtt and been able to reduce the loading on Homey further by moving all the zigbee devices across, well all but 9 which will be moving across tomorrow.

So Homey is now unburdened and targeted at tasks it does exceptionally well and shares all the data and commands through MQTT.

39

Thx for the info.

Is that issue with the hue app with bridge or without that you have that issue?
To what do you connect your zigbee devices now and installed zigbee2mqtt?

40

I was using the Athom Philips Hue App on a Homey Pro 2019.

I do have a lot of Hue bulbs ~80 and ~20 motion sensors over two Hue Hubs.

I want to keep the Hue hubs and Motion Sensors so Lighting remains autonomous.

I use a Node Red Node to connect to the Hue Hubs and it is quick very very quick.

I have a Mac mini with the new M1 Apple silicon, moved 70TB of video/Music for the Plex library, put the Channel DVR for whole house TV and DVR on it, added Node Red, Mosquitto MQTT Broker, zigbee2MQTT and the Mac mini takes them all in its stride with very very low CPU and most important hardly any power at all, it is using 150w when under full load, which I have yet to experience and is actually using about 18w most of the time.

With the Homey MQTT Client everything that is connected to the Homey is available in Node Red through the MQTT Broker.

I am gobsmacked at how well zigbee2MQTT works - great visualisation of the zigbee network.

Adding devices is the simplest yet I have experienced in 20+ years of doing this. As soon as you introduce a new device ie power it up and zigbee2MQTT hoovers it up and configures it perfectly.

I deployed 20+ mains powered sockets around the house to get a good base in.

Then when you add battery devices you can choice which mains powered device it will sync and join with.

Once up and running, and the barrier here is getting it installed and running can get tricky if you are not used to command line installs.

But once installed it is all gui.

Anyway, for me, building all the home automation logic in Node Red and abstracting all the things under it, Homey through MQTT, Hue through NR Node, etc etc keeps it all very simple and allows for me to change what manages what device, I can cherry pick the best hub to control things, Indigo for some zwave stuff, Hubitat for other zwave devices, Hue for lighting and motion sensors, Homey for the Apps like Zappi, Victron, Eufy Security, Eufy Vacs etc etc and I can change the controller but the logic engine remains static.

My 5c worth - As far as I can determine the best of all worlds.

1 Like