Does Hue lights with Zigbee connection break Hub connection?

[GCalzat]

Can someone please confirm if you have to choose between having the eisy control Philips Hue lights with the ZMatter USB Zigbee controller or have your Philips Hue lights only controlled by Philips Hue hub(s)?

I have not run across anything that confirms this.  For years, I have been running my now 40 Philips Hue lights over two separate Philips Hue hubs using the Hue plugin on Polyglot to interact with the Philips Hue hubs to control my lights.  It's a significant configuration that is also tying each of these Hue nodes to numerous Insteon keypad wall switches that control most of my lights.  I thought it would be great to now configure them as Zigbee devices directly.  However, I seem to have determined after 2 days of trying that if you do this, you completely lose the ability for the Philips Hue hubs to control your lights.  When I configured them as Zigbee devices after factory resetting the bulb and adding the bulbs, the eisy controlled the bulbs as expected, but they immediately lost their connection to the Philips Hue hub.  When I then tried to re-connect the bulb back to the same Philips Hue hub as you would add any bulb to a Philips Hub hub, it then immeditely breaks the direct connection that I just made to the eisy to control the bulb.

When I referred to ChatGPT, it stated the following:

"Can I add a zigbee hue bulb to the universal devices eisy device and have it connected to the philips hue hub at the same time?

No, you cannot connect a Zigbee Hue bulb to both the Universal Devices eisy and the Philips Hue Hub simultaneously. Zigbee devices, such as Philips Hue bulbs, are designed to connect to a single Zigbee controller or hub at a time."

If this is the case, we would lose the ability for numerous mobile apps to control and perform numerous things to your lights which is one of the reasons we purchase Hue bulbs.  Unless anyone knows of a workaround, I will likely have to go back to the only workaround I'm aware of which is using the Hue plugin on Polyglot which has not been updated as of now since May 2022 and has some issues as noted in other threads, but it does work.

Also, someone can feel free to confirm, but if you switch to using them as eisy Zigbee devices instead of the Philips Hue hub, I believe you lose all of the rooms and zones and other Philips Hue app features (special scenes, etc.) since they are no longer being controlled by the hub.  I assume the way to address the rooms/zones as Zigbee devices is to simply create a scene for every room or zone you want to create (e.g. add 3 Hue lights in the living room to a living room scene).

[Guy Lavoie]

Sounds like it's somewhat like z-wave, where a device can only belong to one network at a time. Some topologies, like Insteon, can be controlled by more than one main controller (ie: PLM) but each controller needs to be able to respect (leave) any links that aren't to devices it knows about. That's what the eisy does when you add a new Insteon devices and it gives you the option of leaving any existing links intact. Other networks like z-wave require you to remove a device from any other network in order to add it to a new controller. Zigbee might be similar.

[Geddy]

@GCalzat sounds like you answered your own question in your trial and error. I think the idea was that the newer hue bulbs would be able to connect to the UD zigbee device and therefore not need the hue hub, but as you indicate you might give up a little function by doing that. Having 40 hue bulbs is a lot and if you already had them in the app and pulled into the eisy with the plugin I would suggest leaving them that way. You know...ain't broke don't fix it. I have less than 10 hue bulbs and only one hub and use the Hue Plugin just fine with the eisy. I don't get too fancy with the process though so you might have a lot more for room lighting and color options. I would think the way you had it so well linked is the best way for your situation. 

I agree with @Guy Lavoie that it's more than likely the bulbs can only talk to one hub. Even then it might be an issue that older bulbs might not be able to talk to the Zigbee network that the ZMatter device is using so you would need the hub for those bulbs.

[GCalzat]

Agreed on what you mentioned above, and I believe I did answer my own questions. Per ChatGPT and your thoughts, this seems to be a limitation in the Zigbee protocol itself. It's not eisy's fault that the Zigbee protocol has that limitation. I had only moved 2 hue lights over to the direct Zigbee connections when I realized that I would apparently lose all of the hub and app functionality. So I removed the 2 lights and have them back under hue hub control and through the Polyglot hue plugin.

In the end, using the Polyglot hue plugin approach allows you the both of best worlds so it's hard to move away from it. If you migrate to the eisy Zigbee control, you lose the hub functionality and pretty much the functionality of every single hue app on the app store and google play store (they all require the hue hub for communications). To recognize the impact, just search for "hue" on the app and google play stores and there are easily hundreds of Philips hue apps that require the communications to use the Philips hue hub. If we move to eisy Zigbee control, we unfortunately seem to lose all of that I believe which is one of the main reasons folks use Philips hue is because of the software/app availability. It's definitely not because they are the highest quality. It's unfortunate given the eisy is far more powerful it seems and makes it so much nicer with more direct control of your Zigbee hue lights. In contrast, the hue hub has very low horsepower, very low memory, significant limitations on the number of devices, and slow communications speed to the devices. The fact that there is essentially no way that I can have 40 bulbs unless I have two hubs demonstrates that. Philips could build a better more powerful hub and they essentially have not for so many years. However, I believe the Zigbee protocol itself is part of the issue on these limitations.

Philips finally just released the long awaited ability for two hubs to be controlled as one in the hue app. I've combined them and it broke everything in the Alexa hue skill control since Alexa does not seem to support that quite yet. This is one area where the eisy Zigbee control shines I believe. You do not need two eisys to control your Zigbee hue lights I assume. Again, you would lose all of the above though if you went that route.

For now, I'm forced to go with the Polyglot hue plugin to get the best of both worlds (and not lose functionality from hundreds of apps). Hopefully the plugin will be kept up to date with updated hue functionality which is a concern given it has not been updated since May 2022 as of today. To note, I'm not saying the plugin is bad by any means at all. I greatly appreciate the developer's significant accomplishment with this complex plugin. I literally use it daily, and I have it connected to insteon keypad switches throughout my entire home. It does have issues such as the need to restart the plugin after power glitches and such, but overall it's a nice plugin. However, direct eisy Zigbee control is generally better with color slider controls and other benefits.  Maybe someday there will be fundamental changes or a better workaround that provides a path to allow multiple source control for Zigbee devices. Either way, it's comforting to know that at least Universal Devices's vision and the eisy device supports both approaches.