I realized I have some old hue bulbs laying around, and they’re working well enough with my Zigbee controller (no bridge), but if I decide to scale up I definitely don’t want to pay the Hue premium.

Anyone have a Zigbee bulb brand they recommend? I hear Third Reality is nice?

  • Bosco@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    Ikea’s smart bulbs are compatible without much effort (Home Assistant running Zigbee2MQTT). Much cheaper and widely available year round, only downside I’ve seen is the temperature range isn’t nearly as impressive as the white ambiance Hue bulbs.

    • taaz@biglemmowski.winEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      Considering this thread, guess I should look into why zigbee with mqtt is better then just the default zigbee HA gives.

      • Khanzarate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Zigbee is a mesh network, but Zigbee with mqtt has a hub that stores messages. I haven’t used it myself but it would mean that if, say, a Zigbee bulb was routing a message on the mesh network through a smart switch across the room to the hub, and the switch dropped the connection for a moment, a hub reply could be dropped entirely. Just briefly, but thatd be the intermittent issues that people are describing here.

        MQTT stores all those messages in the hub though and makes the light bulb check in to get the messages, so if a light bulb were to do that and the switch disconnected, the light bulb would notice the failure and just retry, and the message is still on the mqtt hub to be redelivered.

        Dunno if this description is exactly correct, but it sounds like it from my brief look on Wikipedia on communication differences.

    • Successful_Try543@feddit.orgEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      I just want to add that the Hue bulbs are also compatible to Home Assistant. (I’m currently using it with the ‘default’ ZHA which doesn’t work with some China sensors and actors. AfaIk, Zigbe2MQTT would do.)

        • Successful_Try543@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          13 hours ago

          I assume they mean they won’t pay for a Hue Zigbee bridge, a relatively closed eco system, (and some cloud subscription or whatever they mean with Hue Premium) and new (expensive) Hue bulbs, but they already have Hue bulbs in use in an ad-hoc mode with a Zigbee controller.

      • Bosco@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I’ve got several Hue bulbs running through Zigbee2MQTT on HA.

        No issues, easy setup, and annoyingly expensive but they have the temperature range my wife prefers.