Zigbee bulbs reporting status

[siclark]

Hi Nathan,

In my aim to use a number of zigbee sensors I have been looking to migrate my Hue bulbs over to a zigbee network via a zigbee USB stick and the zigbee2mqtt software.

I have got this working now so that I have 5 bulbs and a number of zigbee sensors and wireless buttons / remotes connected. This uses Joe's MQTT connector to publish MQTT messages that a node-red flow picks up and onward publishes to zigbee2mqtt.

However my issue is where the network is weak I get slow reponses from the hue bulbs, or none at all. I also got this behaviour when they were connected to the Hue hub and using your plugin (and I have plans to buy some Ikea mains sockets to boost the network).

So, I was interested to know if you knew if Hue bulbs can report their state? The sensors obviously do regularly, but I read on the zigbee2mqtt forum that only Hue bulbs on very old firmware do. Is this a problem you have (or do they report to the Hue hub)? Ideally I would like to ensure that Indigo remains in sync with actual state of the bulb, not what has been requested, for when that message fails.

Thanks

[nsheldon]

Hi.

Good question. I don’t know anything about the specific ZigBee implementation in the Hue products. The Hue Lights plugin relies entirely on the Hue bridge’s REST implementation to obtain and update Hue device information. And I don’t know whether the Hue bridge actually queries the bulb status or just reports the last known state. I suspect it does some kind of periodic status query because the Hue bridge will report intermittent “reachable” status (shown as “disconnected” or not in Indigo) for bulbs near the edge of radio range even if there has been no recent interaction with the bulb. That may be more of a “ping” than an actual status check though.

[siclark]

I do see “last seen” from the bulb so maybe its just reporting based on that. In fact I think there is a configuration option to adjust that in the zigbee communication to the bulb.

Thanks.

[siclark]

Actually doing more work with Joe it does look like hue bulbs do report their status when changed and on a get request. I’m not sure what the report functionality is and how it differs.