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Most (almost all?) Philips Hue devices are standard Zigbee devices. Chuck out your Philips gateway and replace it with a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant and a Zigb

by jchw 3y ago

Most (almost all?) Philips Hue devices are standard Zigbee devices. Chuck out your Philips gateway and replace it with a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant and a Zigbee stick. Yeah, it's a bit more work, but if you're reading Hacker News you probably already know how to do this anyways, and honestly, Home Assistant is pretty damn good at staying hands-off. (I only update it every few months, it's on a battery backup in my house so it's basically always on, sometimes I forget it's even there.)

acidburnNSA 3y ago
I ordered a Zigbee usb stick right after reading the blog. It came in the mail yesterday. It took me 2 hours to install and configure zigbee2mqtt (I already had mosquitto mqtt server and home assistant installed). As I deleted my HUE and innr bulbs out the HUE app, they started showing up in the zigbee2mqtt panel, and awesomely also right in Home Assistant. I renamed the entities to what they had been before and am fully online without the hue bridge or the huge app. I deleted the hue app right after this and threw the hue bridge in the trash.
dheera 3y ago
> standard Zigbee devices One of the issues with these "standard" Zigbee devices is that you can't configure all of their settings. I have a bunch of Aqara motion sensors and I can't set their timeouts or sensitivity unless I use the Aqara app and hub. Used as a normal Zigbee device they offer no configuration options.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  That’s right. I have a significant investment in Hue devices since they are (or were, prior to sale of company) simply the best LED lamps available. The Hue app surfaces functionality that isn’t available on plain zigbee, such as soft on/off and motion sensor programs. It is possible to mimic this to an extent but the native implementation is superior. I also have a lot of different lamps that are either plain Zigbee or IKEA, and no matter the approach - node-red, home assistant, homekit - the “integrated” experience sucks compared to the Hue.
- nullwarp 3y ago
  There are some quirks fixes that add support for a lot of these in zha that just haven't been merged yet but that you can add https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers/pull/2485 https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers/pull/2485
dotnet00 3y ago
This is what I did from the start, was never going to deal with Wifi bulbs or proprietary hubs, just a zigbee transceiver plugged into my server with homeassistant, mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt and I get all the functionality I could want, I basically always use my watch to control my lights now.
realharo 3y ago
Just using zigbee2mqtt is also an option, as a more lightweight alternative to Home Assistant (for zigbee devices only). It may require a bit more tinkering though, you either need to use it via its web dashboard, or write a simple program in anything that has a mqtt client library (which is basically everything), if you want to link it with things like zigbee remotes or some external triggers, etc.

by jchw 3y ago

acidburnNSA 3y ago

I ordered a Zigbee usb stick right after reading the blog. It came in the mail yesterday. It took me 2 hours to install and configure zigbee2mqtt (I already had mosquitto mqtt server and home assistant installed). As I deleted my HUE and innr bulbs out the HUE app, they started showing up in the zigbee2mqtt panel, and awesomely also right in Home Assistant. I renamed the entities to what they had been before and am fully online without the hue bridge or the huge app. I deleted the hue app right after this and threw the hue bridge in the trash.

dheera 3y ago

> standard Zigbee devices One of the issues with these "standard" Zigbee devices is that you can't configure all of their settings. I have a bunch of Aqara motion sensors and I can't set their timeouts or sensitivity unless I use the Aqara app and hub. Used as a normal Zigbee device they offer no configuration options.

mdekkers 3y ago
That’s right. I have a significant investment in Hue devices since they are (or were, prior to sale of company) simply the best LED lamps available. The Hue app surfaces functionality that isn’t available on plain zigbee, such as soft on/off and motion sensor programs. It is possible to mimic this to an extent but the native implementation is superior. I also have a lot of different lamps that are either plain Zigbee or IKEA, and no matter the approach - node-red, home assistant, homekit - the “integrated” experience sucks compared to the Hue.
nullwarp 3y ago
There are some quirks fixes that add support for a lot of these in zha that just haven't been merged yet but that you can add https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers/pull/2485 https://github.com/zigpy/zha-device-handlers/pull/2485

dotnet00 3y ago

This is what I did from the start, was never going to deal with Wifi bulbs or proprietary hubs, just a zigbee transceiver plugged into my server with homeassistant, mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt and I get all the functionality I could want, I basically always use my watch to control my lights now.

realharo 3y ago

Just using zigbee2mqtt is also an option, as a more lightweight alternative to Home Assistant (for zigbee devices only). It may require a bit more tinkering though, you either need to use it via its web dashboard, or write a simple program in anything that has a mqtt client library (which is basically everything), if you want to link it with things like zigbee remotes or some external triggers, etc.