Debugging lightbulbs. We live in an age of miracles and wonder. :)
Sometimes it helps to manually add them by serial number.
Adding by serial worked for me when I was trying to set up a Hue motion sensor in the front hall. My router (and hub) are in the back of the apartment and I guess the signal wasn’t strong enough or something. Of course, figured out I needed the serial after they’d been installed in the fixture!
I tried out the Hue bulbs and one bulb refused to shut off all the way, so I got my money back on the whole kit. It may have been related to the wiring, not sure. In any event, now I use a Lutron in-wall dimmer (the one Wirecutter recommends) that I can control with Alexa and Apple’s Homekit, and it came with a remote. I decided Halogen bulbs still look better than LED anyway, when dimming.
I have so many ways to dim the lights now… Alexa, my phone, my watch… but mostly I use the little white remote.
I have a dimmer (manual) in our media room. So this Lutron dimmer (and a base station) would be a plug-and-play replacement that would me use my phone or Alexa to control the lights? Waaay cheaper than replacing the current bulbs with Hues.
Haha, yes they do come with an ethernet cable. Since my post 3 years ago I’ve fallen down the Hue rabbit hole and have replaced nearly all the lightbulbs in my house with hues. Those, plus Alexa, plus smartthings, I’m living in the future here!
I have the A19 kit with 4 colour & white bulbs and the bridge, and I use it with my Echo/Echo Dot. They are fantastic; two in the living room, one in bedroom, one in office, right now. Unfortunately, only my office and bedroom lamps can benefit from the colour shifts since the living room lamps have colour shades that limit their use. It’ll be a while before I switch those out. In the meantime, being able to set timers, voice control them, dim/brighten them at will, set colour temperature (for white light), and control remotely via my iPhone are all working as they should. Haven’t tried syncing them with any media or setting ‘moods’ for gaming, but that’s all to come in time, I’m sure.
That’s the dimmer I have and yes, it works with Alexa and your phone. I bought the starter kit, which includes the smart bridge.
Been using a basic Hue kit with my Echos for a year and a half now. Really can’t imagine living without it. Very simple but wonderful use case: letting your light gradually help wake you up in the morning. Starts on the lowest setting and gradually increases to a set maximum. Pairs very nicely with the Echo/Alexa alarm.
Just got an Ambient White bulb synced to Windows version of Flux and it’s quite cool. Got one in home office to remind me to hit the hay and will get another for bedroom.
Got a Pi2 running PiHole + HomeAssistant + HomeBridge and it’s magical tying together HomeKit + non-HomeKit.
OK I may have gone overboard setting them up for Siri HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Home Assistant.
Wasn’t sure whether to put this in the Echo thread or this one, chose this one. I have a Hue Bridge, a Hue Lightstrip Plus (2nd gen, multicolor), about a dozon Hue bulbs (all white) and two original Echos (not Dots). A brand new Echo Plus arrives later today.
I figured I may as well go with the Plus this time and everything I’ve read indicates that it can control dimness and color changes. So I’m hoping/expecting to take out the middle man and decomission the Hue Bridge for good.
Do I merely need to power off the Hue Bridge and direct the new Echo Plus, via the Alexa app, to rediscover my bulbs and create new groups, etc.? Would I have to keep the Hue app on my smartphone for stuff like scenes, or maybe color changes? Not finding much about how to transition from the old setup to a new one.
Edit: Worth noting that once everyting is set up, I only intend to control the lights with my voice. No need to fiddle with the app at that point. Therefore, navigating through all the different menus on the Alexa app (vs. the simpler/better designed Hue app interface) probably won’t be an issue for me. (Some folks have complained about this elsewhere.)
You always need the Bridge but the 1st party Hue app is needed for initial setup only.
Huh. Then what does the Hue Bridge do that the Echo Plus’s “built-in hub” doesn’t?
Echo Plus is a simple way to start your smart home. It has a built-in ZigBee smart home hub, which allows for simple and direct setup of compatible ZigBee lights, locks, plugs, and in-wall switches from brands like Philips Hue, GE, and Yale. No additional hub required.
i was under the impression the hue hub is always needed (you know, to pair, with the button on top of it) and its zigbee radio then is controlled by the one in the echo plus. the echo plus can’t control the hue bulbs directly on an ad hoc basis.
you can try setting them up without the hue hub.
Only had time to set the new Echo Plus & new Echo Dot up on the network tonight and haven’t had time yet to connect the Plus to the lights, but based on what I’ve read it should suffice for everything lighting minus scenes, which I don’t currently use despite owning a Lightstrip. It supposedly only falls short if you want to use it for scenes and for non-bulb devices.
Amazon’s launch of the Echo Plus realises this position with new hardware, effectively providing a way to cut out those third-party companies and work directly with their compatible products. You’ll no longer have to use Alexa skills and importantly, you wouldn’t necessarily need the hub or bridge for that product.
[…]
What you won’t need is the Hue Bridge (£50) and you won’t need to buy the Philips Hue starter kit which is normally how you’d get into the system.
[…]
However, the experience you get from the Echo Plus isn’t the full experience that Philips Hue offers, which the company is quick to point out. Adding the Hue Bridge will unlock the full potential that the system offers, including compatibility with many more sensors, the ability to automate and set scenes, as well as get system updates over the air and future features.
Will spend more time with it tomorrow. I may end up just keeping the Bridge, but I’ll make that decision after I’ve played around with the Plus sans Bridge.
Damn it, now my Hue Bridge is acting up. Almost as if it went into a big sulk after the arrival of the Echo Plus. Which it almost literally has done, as the Hue app says it can’t find the Bridge when it searches.
I reset the Bridge to factory defaults and uninstalled/reinstalled the Hue app on my phone, to no avail. Currently the Bridge is connected to a network switch; tonight I guess I’ll connect it directly to the router and see if anything changes. I can’t imagine the problem is network related, as the network indicator light is a solid green. Worried that the Bridge is just no longer interested in being a team player. And here I was thinking I might not get rid of it after all!
Meanwhile, it’s looking like connecting the Echo Plus to a bunch of Hue bulbs requires adding the Hue Alexa skill, and adding that skill requires linking the Echo Plus to the Hue cloud, and that in turn requires, apparently, on the Hue side, having a Bridge that works. Which is really strange, considering the Echo Plus marketing stuff explicitly highlights this advantage of not strictly requiring owning a Bridge.
Anyway for the time being, I’m back in the dark ages and fumbling for physical light switches like a dirty pleb. I haven’t had to touch light switches in my home for almost two years!
Yeah adding hue cloud requires the hub for sure.
Okay, I managed to resolve the above Hub issue by directing my phone to forget my wifi network and reconnecting to wifi again, as recommended by Hue Bridge Connectivity Issues (huetips .com).
I really don’t know if the Hub is required for the Echo Plus or not. It certainly seems that way based on my experience thus far, but there was enough weirdness with the Hub not being accessible for awhile and the meethue.com website, which the Alexa app directed me to in order to get started on its hub functions, saying that it required that I turn on a Hue Hub, all of which make me think that something is really off with Amazon’s product description saying “No additional hub required”.
In order for me to actually get to the bottom of this, I would have to spend yet another hour or two restoring devices to factory defaults and rediscovering bulbs and renaming them and recreating room groups all over again, which I don’t have the energy to deal with right now. So I’ll just stick with things as they are.
So, as for the Echo Plus, it’s just a more expensive Echo in my opinion, although it does have a 0.8" tweeter versus the 0.6" tweeter on the standard Echo. I have heard people say that it also sacrifices bass for treble, but I don’t blast my music and am not noticing that yet and may not ever notice it.