Convert your Home Assistant instance to a fully functional Philips HUE bridge! Control all lights connected to your Home Assistant box with HUE compatible apps/devices like the official Hue app, Hue essentials and Philips Ambilight+Hue etc.
- Rooms will be auto created based on areas created in Home Assistant.
- All lights will be supported with full functionality.
- For now only support for light entities as it's primary use case is to give you HUE control over your HASS lights.
- Allow you to create your own HUE groups and scenes.
- Secured connection and authentication flow (unlike default emulated hue component in hass).
- Fully emulates a "V2" HUE bridge.
- Loosely coupled with HomeAssistant over low-latency websockets.
- Experimental support for HUE Entertainment (see below).
- You or your family like to use the HUE app for control over ALL your lights, so even non-Zigbee/HUE lights...
- You've replaced the Official HUE bridge with ZHA/zigbee2mqtt and you miss some original HUE features.
- You'd like to sync your lights with your TV/game (e.g. HUE Sync, Ambilight+HUE).
- Add the custom repository to the Home Assistant supervisor's add-on store: https://github.com/marcelveldt/hassio-addons-repo
- Install the Emulated HUE addon from the addon-store
- Start the newly installed addon and it will work instantly
Once started, it will be available as a HUE bridge on your network.
- From your app/device (for example the official HUE app) search for HUE bridges.
- Once the bridge is found by your app/device, there's a notification sent to Home Assistant if you want to enable pairing mode (same as pressing the physical button on the real bridge). It will show you a message in the notification area WITHIN Home Assistant.
- Once you enabled pairing mode, your app has 30 seconds to connect.
- This virtual bridge runs at HTTP port 80 and HTTPS port 443 on your local network. These ports can not be changed as the HUE infrastructure requires them to be at these defaults.
- If you're running the previous/legacy emulated HUE component in HASS, make sure to disable it first.
- Remote Connection support is not available. This thing is local only (which is actually a good thing perhaps?).
The Hue Entertainment API supports a communication protocol which allows a light streaming functionality with the Philips Hue System. Using this protocol, it is possible to stream lighting effects to multiple lights in parallel with a high update rate. It's used for new Ambilight+HUE TV's and the HUE Sync app on PC and Mac.
We've created a (highly experimental!) python implementation of this streaming protocol that actually works pretty well altough not as good as it's original. While packets are indeed live streamed (at a rate between 25-50 messages per second) to our virtual bridge, we unpack them and convert them to commands the light implementations can understand at a more sane rate level (throttling). We choose some settings which result in a nice effect with not too much delay without completely overloading a platform. This means that the Entertainment mode will work with any light connected to Home Assistant. Cool!
The next step we have in mind is, if you own official HUE lights connected to ZHA, to forward the special Entertainment packets into the Zigbee mesh, resulting in the real streaming experience (realtime effects with no delay).
- Support other device types, like switches ?
- Forward Entertainment UDP packages to Zigbee mesh for Official HUE lights that natively support the feature.
- Read HASS scenes to HUE ?
- Create HUE scenes, push to HASS scenes ?
- Support for routines / automations ?
Please use the Github issue tracker for feature requests (including motivation) and off course for reporting any issues you may find!