As we all know ZigBee bulbs should not be included into your “regular” ZigBee mesh. Today I have one main HE C7 and a second C5 for my ZigBee light bulbs. I went away from the Hue Bridge because there was no easy way to control IKEA colored lights through HE via the Hue Bridge. My setup works flawless.
When/if I move to the Core, can IKEA bulbs be controlled 100% paired to the Hue Bridge? If not, what is the best approach?
Keep one of me HE as ZigBee light bulb hub and have those integrated into the main Core hub?
That is a good question, there are probably some good points on previous HE threads as this kind of question has been discussed a number of times I believe.
I have a similar setup, just chose to put my Hue bulbs and accessories on my new C-7 hub, keeping my old C-4 for essentially anything else. I chose, based on comments on the Community, to leave my Samsung buttons and contact sensors on my non-lighting C-4 as some commented that the Zigbee mesh with Hue bulbs, I think it was, typically reverted to using ZLL instead of ZHA Zigbee standard… I could have that around the wrong way, but essentially the recommendation was to keep them separate.
I did also split the devices when using HE and had all lighting on a Hue hub, this mainly due all threads in the forum claiming keeping the Zigbee standards apart. The interesting thing here might be that from the point in time that HA-Blue was introduced and I did receive mine, I’ve been running all Zigbee devices on a single mesh with a Conbee stick without any issues what so ever. The fact is that I’ve never lost any devices despite that this is a mix of IKEA, Hue, Heiman and the infamous Aqara. So excuse my ignorance, but why or what might be the reason for this? Pure luck or do the Conbee have some special feature that just makes this work?
My own conclusion is rather that there might be something that differs with HE in comparison with both Conbee and lo behold SmartThings that causes these kind of issues. So my own goal and hope with the CORE will be to have the same strategy as with the Conbee, a single mesh!
So, when, you move to the CORE you have a couple of different options. We do integrate with HUE in a complete way, so if the HUE hub supports the bulb fully it will be supported in our integration with the HUE hub. You can also do it with dual CORE, though in this particular case I doubt it’ll be needed. There are many other reasons to have more than one CORE.
If your bulbs are always powered there should be no issues with routing on the CORE, there are also some other “magic” employed within the Zigbee library we use which stabilizes many bulbs. Not all, but so far all IKEA ones we have tested.
There are things which differs, definitely, If that is your experience with Conbee the CORE will be similar since we use Zigbee Herdsman.
In general it should work, but there are going to be exceptions for overly misbehaving bulbs. If there are controller-based work-arounds possible, we will be looking at using them.
you have a couple of different options. We do integrate with HUE in a complete way, so if the HUE hub supports the bulb fully it will be supported in our integration with the HUE hub. You can also do it with dual CORE, though in this particular case I doubt it’ll be needed. There are many other reasons to have more than one CORE.