Hue Lighting Control

[jokermac]

I'm in the process of moving to LED and have made a significant investment in HUE.  So far my review is mixed.  The lights are nice and I like the ability to have color, but Phillips app and control is a bit lacking.  

Now trying to integrate with CQC and interested in best practices for control from CQC.  Some initial questions I have are:

1.  In CQC do you have to control everything by individual light, or is there a way to combine for group control?
2.  How many devices do you run on a single hub?
3.  How are you controlling lights across multiple hubs if/when not doing so through CQC?  The Phillips app requires you to switch the hub connection before you can control the associated lights.   
4.  In CQC I see a field for scene that is R/W, but not sure how you would control a scene without a group or room.  Says it is enumerated with the default hue scenes, but how do you make use of this?
5.  Does the CQC driver support motion sensors and switches?  Does not appear to.
6.  Any other advice or thoughts from users who have experience with the Hue system and integration to CQC?

Sorry if this has already been discussed.  I didn't see any recent threads.

[Dean Roddey]

I think that the reason we didn't add motion sensors is because of the horrible way the Hue API is implemented. It's a strict REST API, so it's purely polled. And every poll gets everything, and there's a lot of info associated with each device. So, in order to get any sort of quick response to a motion sensor change, we'd have to hit it a few times a second, and it's pulling over the entire database of device info every time.

It's a completely stupid API and they couldn't have possibly done any research before creating it. We would completely overwhelm the device once you started getting any significant number of devices on it. It's bad enough just for lights and taps. We have to poll just to see taps.

I guess the argument could be made that we are pulling over everything anyway, why not make use of it. But I'm not sure it's really viable to load it up and try to use it with an automation system that needs low latency responses to changes. I know some other folks started having problems with it seeming to max out.

I complained about this really bad design years ago, but nothing has been done to fix it to my knowledge. It wouldn't be hard to do.


For the scenes, you just write the scene name to the field to set that scene. It gets those names from the list of scenes configured in the Hue.

[jokermac]

Hi Dean,

Thanks for the quick response.  Okay, I quickly just tried some tests with the scenes to see how that might work and getting some odd behavior.

Since everything is setup by rooms, I cleared all scenes from one room and created a test scene that just turns on (green) for that room.  I named the scene CQC and then restarted the driver to force a refresh on the enumerated list.  I could then write "CQC" to the scene field, but this resulted in every light turning on.  It also did not result in the test room lights turning green.  I believe every light in the house went to it's last on value.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to work.  For a moment I thought you could have multiple rooms setup with the same scene name and it would set each room accordingly.   I'm assuming CQC is just sending the scene name to the hub, and letting the hub do the work, correct?

[Dean Roddey]

It is just sending the scene name to the hum. I don't know about multiple rooms with the same scene name and what that implies via the control protocol. I added this at the request of some other folks, so maybe they'll see this and respond as to how it works for them.