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Philips Hue - differences of the drivers


blub

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Hi

I am about to setup a Hue system and I know C4 has "native/free" drivers and that there is a driver available from Homeation.

Does anyone know what the differences are and if the paid version is worth it?

thx

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3 hours ago, blub said:

Hi

I just realized that the Control4 Hue driver has almost no lag when I only control1 bulb with a driver instance - but as soon as I used grouped bulbs its laggy.

Can I use advanced lighting scenes to groups single bulbs to one light and then also dim those via navigators?

GROUPS

The driver enables you to set up groups of lamps to operate as one lighting circuit.  There are some important points to note about setting these up.

They must be set up in order.  So you must start with Group 1 then 2 and so on.  You cannot have a gap in the group list otherwise it will not work correctly.
All lights you add to a group must have power to them at the point at which you add them to a group.  So if this is a collection of ceiling lights they must all be on at the point at which you define the group.
 

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On 12/22/2018 at 2:41 PM, blub said:

Hi

I am about to setup a Hue system and I know C4 has "native/free" drivers and that there is a driver available from Homeation.

Does anyone know what the differences are and if the paid version is worth it?

thx

If you think to take advantage of the hue sensors also, you might take a look at this C4 Hue driver:

https://www.unilogiq.com/en/control4-drivers

It covers temperature, motion and light intensity.

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10 hours ago, Bogdy said:

Just out of curiosity, do you use color hue bulbs and control a group of color bulbs from a C4 zigbee switch?

For example: I cannot turn off the color hue bulb with the Control4 hue driver (it stays blue at 3%) and changing colors moves the room through a lot of colors until the final value is reached, especially when using light scenes.

I am testing:

  • Color Hue bulbs (e27 e14)
  • White ambiance Hue bulbs (e27 e14)
  • Osram lightify/smart+ white ambiance bulbs (e27 e14 GU10)
  • Lightify strips

So far for the hardware:

  • The Hue bulb dim lower, so anywhere where dimming is important I will buy Hue.
  • The Smart+ E14 make a pretty loud humming noise - I won't use them - 6 out of 8 have this issue. You can't sit near to them and listen to music. It really is annoying.
  • The GU10 Smart+ are ok, no humming and they are much brighter than Hue GU10.

 

Control4 Hue driver - the  bad:

  • Polling the status of Hue lights does not work at all. When I change something via Hue App it will never appear on Control4 - not even after days.
  • Changing white level does not work reliable. Sometime it works and sometimes the slider just goes back to where I started and nothing happens.
  • Changing color works even worse than white level - or simply put: it mostly does not work.  Color wheel has never worked.
  • Dimming the light works. But mostly there is a significant delay and at some point the light is stuck for 3-10s until the dim level adjusts.

 

Control4 Hue driver - the good:

  • you can group bulbs to form a light in ComposerHE

 

Homeation Hue driver:

- dimming is fast and responsive.  In my testing it never got "stuck"

- Annoying is that each driver instance gets its own Hue-API Key, so you have to register each Control4 instance with the Hue bridge.

The driver seems not be able to group bulbs to form one light. So if you have ceiling light with 4 bulbs you get 4 lights in Control4 - doesn't make much sense to me. You can however add those bulbs to a scene and turn it an/off, I haven't figured out how to dim this scene yet via Control4 app.

 

 

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On 12/30/2018 at 6:28 PM, tdougray said:

I thought about permanently wiring my lights on and even made an aluminium faceplate  at work which  housed the Philips switch flush. It looked bloody good and quite high end but I dropped the idea once I thought about it. If my router/network was to fail I would be left with no lights or all permanently on 😂

This is a disadvantage to most smart lighting setups:

  • If you go Control4 switches and dimmers and you HC dies you loose control of locations where a keypad controls a load.
  • If you go KNX and the KNX server or Control4 HC dies you loose all control.
  • If you choose Hue and the Hue bridge dies you loose all control - if lights are hardwired allways on. If the HC dies you can still use Hue to operate the lights.

I am not sure if I covered all possible scenarios but as you can see there is always a risk.


If I go all Hue I will make the light electrically "always on" but will probably put a tiny switch in my wall boxes behind the keypads. So in case the HC dies I can take those off and directly control the lights until the HC has been replaced (something like this: https://www.voelkner.de/products/42168/InterBaer-Wippschalter-8014-108.01-250-V-AC-6A-1-x-Aus-Ein-rastend-1St..html?ref=43&gclid=Cj0KCQiA68bhBRCKARIsABYUGidfAWTSBsCrgecnrEcNUFDcCy8hfvH1f_oAkIxuMYEaBbyhUqTo3zIaAvbWEALw_wcB )

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2 hours ago, blub said:

This is a disadvantage to most smart lighting setups:

  • If you go Control4 switches and dimmers and you HC dies you loose control of locations where a keypad controls a load.
  • If you go KNX and the KNX server or Control4 HC dies you loose all control.
  • If you choose Hue and the Hue bridge dies you loose all control - if lights are hardwired allways on. If the HC dies you can still use Hue to operate the lights.

I am not sure if I covered all possible scenarios but as you can see there is always a risk.


If I go all Hue I will make the light electrically "always on" but will probably put a tiny switch in my wall boxes behind the keypads. So in case the HC dies I can take those off and directly control the lights until the HC has been replaced (something like this: https://www.voelkner.de/products/42168/InterBaer-Wippschalter-8014-108.01-250-V-AC-6A-1-x-Aus-Ein-rastend-1St..html?ref=43&gclid=Cj0KCQiA68bhBRCKARIsABYUGidfAWTSBsCrgecnrEcNUFDcCy8hfvH1f_oAkIxuMYEaBbyhUqTo3zIaAvbWEALw_wcB )

Your quite right nothing smart seems to be full proof! 

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Hi

I just realized that the Control4 Hue driver has almost no lag when I only control1 bulb with a driver instance - but as soon as I used grouped bulbs its laggy.

Can I use advanced lighting scenes to groups single bulbs to one light and then also dim those via navigators?

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On 12/30/2018 at 6:28 PM, tdougray said:

I thought about permanently wiring my lights on and even made an aluminium faceplate  at work which  housed the Philips switch flush. It looked bloody good and quite high end but I dropped the idea once I thought about it. If my router/network was to fail I would be left with no lights or all permanently on 😂

If you add your Philips Hue Switch or Dimmer, this gets registered in the hue gateway and communicated only via the Hue Zigbee network. So if you have no internet nor lan, there should be no issue on using the Philips Hue Switches, C4 and the apps won't work then...

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1 minute ago, tdougray said:

GROUPS

The driver enables you to set up groups of lamps to operate as one lighting circuit.  There are some important points to note about setting these up.

They must be set up in order.  So you must start with Group 1 then 2 and so on.  You cannot have a gap in the group list otherwise it will not work correctly.
All lights you add to a group must have power to them at the point at which you add them to a group.  So if this is a collection of ceiling lights they must all be on at the point at which you define the group.
 

Hi

I pretty much followed this guide and the groups are in order - but do the light also need to be in order - So group 1 can only have light 1 2 3 4 or can the group also have light 1 2 5 6 ?

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3 minutes ago, blub said:

Hi

I pretty much followed this guide and the groups are in order - but do the light also need to be in order - So group 1 can only have light 1 2 3 4 or can the group also have light 1 2 5 6 ?

No I think you can have any number sequence within each group. 

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On 12/22/2018 at 4:41 PM, blub said:

Hi

I am about to setup a Hue system and I know C4 has "native/free" drivers and that there is a driver available from Homeation.

Does anyone know what the differences are and if the paid version is worth it?

thx

Did you reach a conclusion? Which one is better?

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The paid version only allows control of 1 bulb per driver instance - so it's useless.

I stick to the Control4 driver for now even if it has issues.

I currently test the Phoscon Zigbee gateway as it allows up to 200 Zigbee devices and has 2way feedback - works great with the Android 3rd party Hue apps.
However it doesn't work with the Control4 driver.... crap :-)

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1 hour ago, blub said:

I currently test the Phoscon Zigbee gateway as it allows up to 200 Zigbee devices and has 2way feedback - works great with the Android 3rd party Hue apps.
However it doesn't work with the Control4 driver.... crap 🙂

I *think* this is the rest interface that would work with that device:

http://dresden-elektronik.github.io/deconz-rest-doc/

 

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On 12/22/2018 at 7:45 PM, blub said:

Ok, that's what I call a straight forward answer 🙂

Thx

Just out of curiosity, do you use color hue bulbs and control a group of color bulbs from a C4 zigbee switch?

For example: I cannot turn off the color hue bulb with the Control4 hue driver (it stays blue at 3%) and changing colors moves the room through a lot of colors until the final value is reached, especially when using light scenes.

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I thought about permanently wiring my lights on and even made an aluminium faceplate  at work which  housed the Philips switch flush. It looked bloody good and quite high end but I dropped the idea once I thought about it. If my router/network was to fail I would be left with no lights or all permanently on 😂

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Ahh.

Yeah that's true.
But if you want to control Hue the ideal way you need to make all lights permanent power on.
So a non wired keypad with energy harvesting is just fine.
Compared to the current Hue swtich/dimmer the new ones can be configured with standard decor faceplates - I.e. Busch Jaeger names compatible series somewhere. So they can look like any other switch in your house and can also be directly mounted to the UP60 boxes we have in Europe

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16 minutes ago, blub said:

"Friends of Hue" Switches" are intended to replace regular switches. They are available in different designs. However they don't integrate into Control4.

I'll give feedback to my KNX experiment, on and off shouldn't be an issue. However my dealer said he isnt sure if dimming up and down with keeping the button pressed will work or not.

From what I have researched they will be intended to replace their own smart switch not regular light switches as they will not have any electrical connections inside to take the t&e cables installed into traditional switches. below is what I have read.

Hue smart switches in single and multiple-switch frames do not need wired connections or batteries to turn lights on or off, dim the lights, or choose light scenes. The switches operate via an energy-harvesting 2.4 GHz Zigbee GreenPower wireless technology based on kinetic energy from EnOcean.

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"Friends of Hue" Switches" are intended to replace regular switches. They are available in different designs. However they don't integrate into Control4.

I'll give feedback to my KNX experiment, on and off shouldn't be an issue. However my dealer said he isnt sure if dimming up and down with keeping the button pressed will work or not.

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On 12/28/2018 at 10:11 PM, blub said:

 

What I have found so far:

- Friends of Hue switches - available Q1 2019, Disadvantage: can't be used in C4 but those will do the job just fine

- Light Link switches - seem to be a PITA as they pair with the bulbs directly

- z-wave keypads. Z-Wave and C4 seems to be pretty dead. The native integration is too limited and from what I have read here there don't seem to be new drivers (vera only) and/or many people using it.

- KNX - thats what I will probably do because if I have working KNX system there are almost no limits. Good KNX RF+ keypads are about 90€ a piece for a 8 btn config. So I got myself a KNX test-kit with all the prerequisites and if I get that working I'll as someone to hook it up into C4.

I have seen the friends of Hue range but they are just a replacement for their own dimmer switch I believe and not a replacement for the light switch itself. If as you say no C4 integration then not an option anyway. Would be really interested how you get on with KNX system thou? Good luck

 

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On 12/26/2018 at 3:44 PM, tdougray said:

If you are going to replace with the Hue bulbs make sure you get the white Ambience range, with that you can get any shade of white and the brightness is ace.

 

As for the light switch question this is the biggest problem i have right now and it is doing my head in.There are no switches available to replace your main light switches. As you know Hue only works if your switches are always on.( Hue controls the bulb not the switch). So at the min i am using their dimming switch along side C4 but to be honest it looks cheap, nasty and i cant stand it. ideally I want to combine native C4 switches with the Hue bulbs as i think this would work best. The trouble i have is that i want to buy and install the switches myself and just have someone remote in to program them but I cant find anybody in the UK willing to do this.

So  I have bought a Sonooff switch( waiting for it to turn up) and hopefully will be able to integrate this into my project using MQTT bridge driver and a bit of programming.

 

What I have found so far:

- Friends of Hue switches - available Q1 2019, Disadvantage: can't be used in C4 but those will do the job just fine

- Light Link switches - seem to be a PITA as they pair with the bulbs directly

- z-wave keypads. Z-Wave and C4 seems to be pretty dead. The native integration is too limited and from what I have read here there don't seem to be new drivers (vera only) and/or many people using it.

- KNX - thats what I will probably do because if I have working KNX system there are almost no limits. Good KNX RF+ keypads are about 90€ a piece for a 8 btn config. So I got myself a KNX test-kit with all the prerequisites and if I get that working I'll as someone to hook it up into C4.

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20 hours ago, blub said:

Ok, good to know.
I guess I have to return the Lightify bulbs and get Hue only.
Actually pretty sad as the Lightify bulbs are shorter and fit better into my lamps and are quite a but brighter.

What do you use to turn on the Hue besides a C4 or Hue GUI/App? - wall switches, and if so which ones?

I don't actually use switches for Hue as its typically only side lamps that are connected. Hue app, C4 and Apple Homekit the iPads are what we use. 

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If you are going to replace with the Hue bulbs make sure you get the white Ambience range, with that you can get any shade of white and the brightness is ace.

 

As for the light switch question this is the biggest problem i have right now and it is doing my head in.There are no switches available to replace your main light switches. As you know Hue only works if your switches are always on.( Hue controls the bulb not the switch). So at the min i am using their dimming switch along side C4 but to be honest it looks cheap, nasty and i cant stand it. ideally I want to combine native C4 switches with the Hue bulbs as i think this would work best. The trouble i have is that i want to buy and install the switches myself and just have someone remote in to program them but I cant find anybody in the UK willing to do this.

So  I have bought a Sonooff switch( waiting for it to turn up) and hopefully will be able to integrate this into my project using MQTT bridge driver and a bit of programming.

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