Best price according to camels
"The heart of your Philips Hue system"… blah, blah
Not sure if this is v2 or v3
CamelCamelCamel.
Can't find details on the Philips site.
Officeworks' product page states:
"This newer version of the Hue Bridge remembers your routines even in an internet black out and comes with upgraded memory and power."
There’s no such thing as a v3
good to know… i have the v2
v2
Do yourself a favour buy a zigbee usb host and a raspberry pi, install home assistant and live much happier not tied to BS ecosystems :)
Commie! ;-)
and live much happier
I'm happier with my Hue lights.
You can still use hue lights, plus you can use any other branded lights you like, or even window/door sensors and they can use your hue lights as nodes in their zigbee mesh :) don’t get me wrong the hue bridge has its place… my elderly parents there’s no way their setting up a pi… but then I’d be kinda surprised if they went and bought smart lights :D
you can use any other branded lights you like
I like the Hue lights and bought a stack of them on clearance. Still have stacks I haven't installed.
You can still do that with hue and home assistant anyway
Shhhhhh the dumb people are getting offended
Could you point me to a video or something where I could achieve this? And does it work as good as the hue bridge?
I would like to know too please.
https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi/
Personally I use a 4 without issue, some people say the older models can struggle as you get many services.
For zigbee the usb device I used was a SONOFF Zigbee USB 3.0 dongle it didn’t require any special drivers or anything in home assistant, it was recognised no problem. The hardest part is googling how to put various devices eg bulbs etc into pairing mode (not hard). Personally I’ve found this to work better than any of the hubs I’ve used including hue and ikea.
Home assistant is a great way to manage anything smart in your home, a feature I particularly like of home assistant is the ability to expose devices not normally HomeKit compatible to HomeKit. Eg my sensibo aircon :) it even connects into my Fronius solar inverter and stores all its logs so I can see all my generated electricity without having to pay for Fronius premium service. Home assistant can also continuously scan your network so any time it detects a new smart device it will ask if you’d like to integrate it. It even connects to my printer and reveals a sensor for toner level. You can then write automations with those sensors eg send me a discord message when my printer toner is low.
In summary home assistant becomes your one stop shop for all things smart.
Edit: I haven’t watched this exact video but this guy is great in his other videos I’ve watched I can only imagine this is pretty good too https://youtu.be/LI3lhgOiZ-8
Edit: he recommends using an ssd or something with your pi, you can, I’ve been using mine for ages with a microsd card no problem
You lose the ability to firmware updates and extra steps for remote connection to your lights as hue has native secure remote management built in
I don’t think having the Hue hub connected to HomeAssistant is a bad option myself if you have enough bulbs to justify the dedicated hub. Makes updates etc simpler IMO. May mean you end up eventually needing a seperate ZigBee stick if you then venture towards other non Hue devices, but again that’s perfectly achievable and they’ll all still play together nicely from a management perspective, although running two seperate ZigBee networks will give up some of the routing advantages you get when you scale up, which is a trade off.
This, I started out connecting my various hubs to home assistant and eventually went nope it’s better to have them all on the same zigbee network. Plus tbh I was finding the hubs integration were generally the point of failure if/when things went wrong. IKEA kept loosing its sync to HomeKit for example… moving to a generic zigbee host with home assistant and removing dependencies on internet etc to work became the clear end state.
The hue system just works and is compatible with home assistant Alexa and google and homekit so no need for the extra work
Hue hub supports IKEA ZigBee, nue ZigBee and other ZigBee lights so it's not that locked down, also supports IKEA switches and plugs
There is no v3 a bridge that can do more than 50 devices would be great though. I’m sitting at about 70.
Just wait until the starter sets go on clearance or Black Friday sales. Unless you need a 2nd bridge in a hurry no real reason to buy a bridge stand alone.
I got both my bridges in heavily discounted starter packs.
i got my starter kit form $39.99 delivered from Kogan earlier this year, including 2 globes.
oh man people buy these as standalone?
I have one sitting in the garage I thought would end up in landfill from a starter kit. Maybe I should put it on gumtree, $20 is $20 etc.
Def list it for sale. Was a while ago but I’m sure I sold my second hub for between $40 and $50 a while back.
what's the difference?