Hold on to your hats, folks: With the release of Home Assistant Core 2021.6, the Philips Hue integration has been given a shiny new coat of paint to make your user experience smoother than a jazz playlist.
Why the Philips Hue integration with Home Assistant needed improving
Home Assistant and Philips Hue have been playing nicely together for a while now. Their integration is as solid as a rock, and one of its best perks? It can run without any cloudy services and, believe it or not, it can even work offline. How's that for a tech miracle? The secret behind the curtain is a local API, where Home Assistant blinks at the Philips Hue bridge and gets the lowdown on the state of paired lights and sensors. Sure, local control is usually the belle of the ball, but the previous integration method wasn’t exactly without its limitations.
Pushing beats pulling
The old method, known as polling, could sometimes make your lights slow on the uptake because Home Assistant had to poke the hub sporadically to see if anything had changed. But there's another, better way of doing things: pushing.
Imagine the Philips Hue Hub is your friendly neighbourhood postman, dropping off a state-change at Home Assistant’s front door as soon as it happens. This means you get updates in the blink of an eye and faster response times than with polling. And guess what? With the release of Home Assistant Core 2021.6, the Philips Hue integration now supports local pushing, which is a major upgrade from the previous local polling method.
An upgrade at no costs
So, what does Home Assistant Core 2021.6 bring to the table? The Philips Hue integration is now turbocharged with local pushing, which is a serious step up from the old local polling method. But the real cherry on top? There's nothing but blue skies ahead for users. This upgrade is a no-strings-attached deal, with no need to fiddle with configurations. All you need to do is update to the latest version of Home Assistant Core, and you'll be enjoying faster response times faster than you can say “let there be light!”
Will push only be used for state changes to lights, or will sensor state changes be pushed as well?
The polling of sensor state is a main reason why people use Zigbee USB sticks instead of the Hue Bridge for sensor automations.
The way I read it on the HA website, it is available for everything. I’d still rather use Zigbee2MQTT though, as I can connect just about everything to it.
“response times will increase”??
I think that should be “improve”
You are absolutely correct, of course. Article updated! Thanks!
Article tells me NOTHING – what’s the point of this
Around 15% of Home Assistant users have the Philips Hue integration active, and they might not have been aware that this is happening. It’s called news. I try not to pad my articles out too much and keep things relevant. What exactly were you expecting?
How does one enable this? I use many hue lights and I still have issues with not all lights turning on or off and response times on hue switches take up to 5 seconds. It’s very frustrating.
This should be the new default. Have you set up the integration using the UI? Or perhaps you have too few mains-powered Zigbee devices to expand the mesh.
I have the same problem as James (with an Hue Bridge V2) : state of bulbs take up to 5 sec to raise into HA. I set up integration using UI.