Can direct association work if the Hue bulbs are paired to the Hue Hub and the Blue switch is paired to Home Assistant via ZHA? I’ve always preferred the functionality of the Hue hub vs ZHA for my bulbs.
No. They have to use the same hub for binding.
Can hue bulbs be paired on Hubitat?
If so, would it mess up zigbee network on hubitat?
They should. It’s zigbee controlled and Hubitat has zigbee radio. Should be similar setup for those who using ST hub and Hue bulbs.
It’s possible, yes, but most folks have found them to be problematic since they’re ZLL – it tends to make for ZB mesh headaches. It may work fine for you, but it’s pretty universally regarded as a bad idea on Hubitat.
I really just have one place ZB binding would be a sweet win with one of my Blues, and I’m planning to replace those 2 Hue bulbs with a couple INNRs (since they are zigbee 3.0, and will for certain play well in my ZB mesh).
Otherwise, all my Hue stuff is on my Hue bridge and integrated to HE via CoCoHue. That arrangement works totally fine overall for us, but having dumb-switch response speed in our bathroom via ZB binding will be a nice win!
1 Like
Just wanted to confirm that I tested Zigbee bindings w/Hubitat earlier tonight and it works great. Nice work to @adamkempenich – the app is simple and gets the job done!
I’ll do some more testing tomorrow, but tonight I just did Switch to Bulb and Switch to Bulbs.
I paired Philips Hue bulbs directly to Hubitat fairly easily.
I’ll definitely defer to @hydro311’s advice with Hue and Hubitat as I haven’t tested the longevity of having the Hue’s paired nor do I have a large Zigbee network on Hubitat.
Instructions can be found here: How To's | Setup Zigbee Binding - Hubitat (Work in Progress).
3 Likes
Eric, thank you for the info and the Binding on Hubitat how-to guide – that will be great to have when I get to those two installs (I thought of another good binding spot last night)
@mraz.camren – perhaps I shouldn’t have been so pooh-pooh about putting Hue directly on HE… Maybe the bulbs will be just fine on your setup, so you could always give it a whirl and see how it goes. Any mesh issues shouldn’t be so bad they totally crash your mesh - I’d just watch out for any missed events, slowness, etc across your ZB mesh.
The main issue is that Hue bulbs will (try to) be repeaters in your mesh, but because they are ZLL (not ZHA), that can cause wonkiness to traffic routing through them. Whether that ends up being negligible impact or big impact really depends on your own zigbee setup though – no one can predict how it’ll be.
1 Like
So the Hue bulbs have to be paired directly to Hubitat and not through the hue hub and the hue integration (or CoCoHue)? I would prefer if it worked through the hue hub still. If this is unknown I’ll test this when I get my blues.
Only if you want to use binding between the switch and Hue bulbs. If you want to toggle scenes or just dim through the Hue hub, you can use it using the Hue bridge integration that Hubitat has.
2 Likes
Yep, @harjms nailed it above… There should be no issue at all with using Blue on Hue bulbs you have integrated into HE via native integration, CoCoHue, etc. The only downside may be a slight response delay, but that’s not unique to Blue. That delay may be noticeable enough to get on your nerves or maybe not (depending on your setup and desires). For most of my Hue lights, having a teeny delay is no big deal at all, since most are primarily time- or presence-based automations anyway.
Binding offers the advantage of tying the Blue directly to the corresponding bulbs (so faster response). But binding requires the Blue and the bulbs to be on the same hub, hence the conundrum with Hue.
2 Likes
The OP was about reducing the response delay and the differences between Red series and Blue series. So you are saying that the response delay I am seeing with the Red series would be the same on Blue series if I continue to use the Hue integration and have the Hue bulbs served to Hubitat through the hue hub? To see any benefit from binding I would have to have the hue bulbs paired directly to Hubitat, bypassing the Hue hub altogether?
I’m still in the middle of migrating to HA; I prefer HE for Webcore. I guess in the meantime to still have my bulbs in HA I can use this: GitHub - jason0x43/hacs-hubitat: A Hubitat integration for Home Assistant
1 Like
I’m guessing any Hue delay you get with Red would be comparable on Blue too. The speed-bump is with HE relaying back-&-forth to Hue bridge in either case.
Yes, for binding, the Hue bulbs would need to be paired on HE itself, not via Hue bridge integration. See my posts further up for some be-awares on doing that though.
2 Likes
All other things being equal, yes — but FWIW, I use Red Series with Hue Bulbs via Hubitat and the Hue Bridge and barely notice any delay. The main things the amount of time between the time you press the paddle and the time the event gets fired, which always incurs a slight delay if you have multi-taps enabled because it needs to determine if you’re done or going to do more. IMHO, the default delay here on the Red Series was unbearably high, something like 750 ms. A later firmware update added the ability to set it any multiple of 100 ms by way of parameter 50, which I like much better. The Blue Series has a similar option (and a similarly high default).
In my experience, that makes far more of a difference than anything else, and it’s a “delay” you’d get no matter how the commands eventually get to the Hue bulbs. But yes, binding would likely be a tiny bit faster, and it doesn’t need the hub so would still work if that was off or broken for some reason. I know the alternative sounds like a lot — Zigbee or Z-Wave to the hub, hub to Hue over LAN, Hue Bridge to bulbs over Zigbee — but it’s really super-fast in my experience. (I have Red Series switches and dimmers, Lutron Pico removes [which even involves an extra step between the Lutron Main Repeater and Hubitat!], and more controlling Hue bulbs as-is, and it’s hard for me to imagine anything being much faster — aside, again, from the pre-firmware-update days when it took over 3/4 of a second for anything to happen…)
3 Likes
I have the delay turned off or at least set low enough that my multitaps still work (200ms or something) and there’s still a noticeable delay with Red series to Hue Hub bulbs. I’m mostly wanting this for bathrooms as you usually want those lights faster, so I’m hoping adding those bulbs to hubitat directly and binding with blue series will speed up that response.
Right now, you can press the paddle up and the light won’t turn on until you’re already at the toilet, I want to minimize this delay.
What hub are you using to perform this automation? From your profile, looks like SmartThings? If so, I guess that’s not surprising — it needs to travel over the Internet to their servers (which are hopefully up and maybe performing well at that time 
) and back. With Hubitat, or presumably any fully local system, it’s hard for me to imagine the entire automation being any faster.
That latency is likely due to the fact that the bulbs are paired to the Hue hub. The ST server has to talk to the Phillips server which has to send the command down to your Hue hub. If the bulbs were paired directly to the SmartThings hub, the response would be much quicker.
I have a number of zigbee bulbs controlled via scenes via Red switch presses and there is essentially no delay. If you run the bulbs under an edge driver they will be even faster since the processing will be local. But anytime you have a cloud to cloud connection, there will be latency.
I have hubitat (and home assistant). You don’t think there would be any speed increase in using bulbs paired directly to the hub and using zigbee binding? It was kind of the whole reason I bought blue…
I’m not using smartthings (I don’t know how to change my profile, I only use it for geofencing), but the bulbs are on the hue hub and connected to hubitat with the built in integration. My goal is to just decrease that delay and I hope I can do that with Blue and zigbee binding. Are you saying I’d get the speed increase by just adding them to hubitat directly (no hue hub) and I don’t necessarily need zigbee binding? If that’s the case, what’s the point of binding?
I’m just hoping to get the bulbs to respond as quickly as they do with the Hue dimmer switch.
I am on SmartThings but it should be the same in Hubitat. Cutting out the cloud to cloud connection by eliminating the Hue hub should definitely reduce the response time. Binding may be even faster, but you’ll have to experiment.
So I would not say you don’t need binding. Try it both ways and see which you prefer. I think that binding eliminates the issue with keeping the LED syncd to the bulb state.
I think Eric (H.?) did a video comparison a while back, and bindings were slightly faster than a hub-involved integration. Maybe that was Z-Wave with Z-Wave Association…I can’t remember. But I guess it would be pretty similar either way (I tend to think of Zigbee as faster, if anything, but that’s mostly a general observation of Z-Wave vs. Zigbee motion sensors and less to do with the protocols themselves).
So it will probably be faster; whether it’s noticeable or not, I don’t know. The most odd thing here seems to be that it’s so slow for you now…
1 Like
Is it not because of the Hue hub? And I just checked, my button delay is on 100ms and “Disable physical on/off delay” is set to No. This video shows the delay that I’m trying to minimize in my bathroom, the other rooms are as slow but they are larger rooms so it feels like a better speed, if that makes sense.
My switches control the bulbs through a webcore piston.
1 Like