Phillips Hue And Third Party Apps

[Topfox]

Hey everyone,

Curious on what options are really available or what people are doing with Phillips Hue integration in C4. Like what can be done with the lights in C4 vs third party app.

I currently have a room where I have about 12 or so recessed lights. It’s basically like a hosting room with a bar and so forth. All the lights are Hue bulbs and the switch is a C4 on/off switch. Currently I just use C4 to do just that, turn the lights on/off.   Outside of C4 I use a third party app called Thorlight. This allows me to pick all kinds of various color options when using the Hue lights, as well as picking animation scenes that come out of the box. Think fading between various colors,  the lights chasing each other, strobe affect, and the list goes on and on. 
 

Curious if I can actually integrate Thorlight into C4 or if I can replace what Thorlight does with C4 by the drivers available for Philips Hue in C4 or a similar driver that might be available. My current assumption is I can have C4 set the bulbs to a certain color, but beyond that it would take a lot of programming to get similar affects to what I get from Thorlight out of the box. 

[TundraSonic]

There is a C4 driver from Phillips that we've been using for about 18 months with about 20 Hue GU-10 downlights. From within C4 we can directly control all 6 Hue parameters including RGB level, red, green and blue channels separately, 'White Warmth' and 'Lamp Color Temp'. Any of these can likewise be set in a scene and we've a number of scenes that set Hue's to various dim levels, color temps or colors. Overall it works well. 

HOWEVER, Hue have some major drawbacks; 

1) They use Zigbee which is fine if you have a very few Hue lamps in a small space but completely falls apart if you have more than about 20 or a larger space. Zigbee also doesn't work as reliably with downlight cans as WiFi.

2) You can only use one bridge per system. We originally had a lot more Hue but had to remove all but those in our gym and rec room because we simply couldn't get a reliable signal to them. We've replaced most of the Hue w/ LIFX (which have their own problems but work much better than Hue).

3) Hue lamps are very low CRI/TM-30. The whites are all pretty vacuous kind of like florescent. They sometimes have annoying flicker.

The Hue C4 driver is much better and more reliable than the very unreliable LIFX C4 driver from Chowmain. However, the LIFX lamps use WiFi which has proven much better and more robust for this than Zigbee, especially with only a single bridge and not good repeater options.

Hue lamps that get a Zigbee signal are much more reliable then LIFX. 

As for animations, you'd need to either program them yourself or continue to use Thorlight. Thorlight can co-exist w/ C4. They both just tell lights what to do and the lights don't really care who or what is telling them they just do what they're told.

[Cam]

Hi there

 

what driver do you use? The Philips hue driver I have doesn’t enable me to change light colours, only store preset light levels

 

[Gary Leeds UK]

Gents - have a look at the Colour Wheel from Janus - Its on Driver central