Home Assistant Core and Philips Hue have had a robust integration for some time now, with the added benefit of not requiring any cloud services and the ability to operate offline. The integration relied on a local API, where Home Assistant Core would simply query the Philips Hue bridge for the state of paired lights and sensors. Although local control is always preferred over cloud control, the current integration method was not without its limitations. With the release of Home Assistant Core 2021.6, the Philips Hue integration has been upgraded to improve the overall experience.
The method just described, called polling, can cause slight delays in response times as Home Assistant needs to periodically check the hub for any changes. An alternative to polling is pushing, where the device, in this case the Philips Hue Hub, actively sends a state change to Home Assistant as soon as it occurs. This allows for near real-time updates and faster response times compared to polling. With the release of Home Assistant Core 2021.6, the Philips Hue integration now supports local pushing, a significant upgrade over the previous local polling method.
With the release of Home Assistant Core 2021.6, the integration with Philips Hue is getting a major boost with the addition of local pushing—a significant improvement over the previous local polling method. This upgrade is a win-win situation for users as there are no downsides to the change. Everything will work seamlessly without the need for any adjustments to the configuration, and users can expect faster response times just by updating to the latest version of Home Assistant Core.
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.