diyHue VS zigbee2mqtt

Check out diyHue to use the Hue app with Zigbee2MQTT without a physical Hue bridge. I've been running it for almost a year with zero problems using the Hue Essentials app.

I would highly suggest you run diyHue on either an old computer, or a Pi. diyHue is a hub emulator, it can take many sources, e.g. a Hue hub, Home Assistant, etc, then make them appear as a single hub in the Hue app.

Finally, i'd like to mention DiyHUE, (HA addon and integration availables) which is basically a HUE emulator that allow you to add a lot of non-hue lights into the HUE ecosystem, and control them using the official HUE app, which has a really nice UI and the whole "hue labs" formulas and custom effects included, which is awesome

Maybe diyHue is what you're looking for. As a warning, consider it in alpha stage.

There’s a few projects out there like this: https://openrgb.org/ and https://diyhue.org/ there’s probably a few others too.

Ther also exists a Hue Bridge emulator called DIYhue. I didn‘t try it yet but it seems promising. This Software can run on a Pi and emulates a Hue Bridge. Therefore your official Hue app can discover it. On the other end the Software connect with the real Bridge but also with third party devices. For example over the ConBee II ZigBee USB Stick.

Get a Pi and a Zigbee gateway stick and install diyHue instead. Don't let Philips pull the rug on you, like they did with the v1.

My solution when family and work will let me is to see if an alternate zigbee controller can be used with diyhue.org and Zigbee2MQTT.io and see if I can use some of the Chinese switches but still use the app that the family are used to.

Ahh ok. There's about a 50 device limit per hub on Hue. When you hit that, you could either move everything over to the HA server, or you can run multiple hubs, and then use diyHue to emulate a hub, and create a new virtual hub with both hubs merged. We have everything connected to the HA server through Zigbee2MQTT, but we still run diyHue as it works with HA as well. We use it because people like the app, and personally I like the app as well as it has some features that aren't easy or reasonable to add in Lovelace. We're also staying on version 3.8 of the app, before the new shitty redesign (I have a 3.8 apk I've modded to not update if you would like it).

Have you considered Zigbee2mqtt[0]? You'd be running an extra program, but the docs are really good, it's pretty lightweight, and MQTT is incredibly easy to talk to from python or basically anything else.

[0] - https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)

This is definitely better than many of the alternatives but still not perfect. With Zigbee etc you end up locked into one or more of the ecosystems, not to mention some manufacturers implementing it in a way that has weird quirks (see [1]). With esphome you have a limited choice of devices (would love to see more), but you also usually end up locked into keeping a 2.4GHz WPA2 AP for your devices (and you miss out on mesh, but also the problems when it doesn't work...)

1: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/16717

I can recommend this: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

You can keep your Hue bulbs and devices but threw away the app, hub, and need to work with hue as an institution at all.

I got a $30 USB zigbee stick to replace the hub. works great!

It looks like it uses zigbee? If you have a server you could run zigbee2mqtt. You'd also need a zigbee dongle / adapter.

\also posted on the z2m* github device discussion board

If you want to use HA on your phone, you would need to install it on the pi, along with either ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT for the Zigbee network interface. Debian alone won't be able to interface with most of your smart devices.

I still haven't understood if the devices will change the path using the better route or not (since I've just tested a bTicino switch K4003C and it keeps using the worst path with 1 or 0 signal quality over a near Ikea repeater with a signal quality of 50).