Goodbye Philips Hue Bridge: moving my lighting to Home Assistant ZHA

Goodbye Philips Hue Bridge: moving my lighting to Home Assistant ZHA

I’ve used Philips Hue for years, although many of the bulbs connected to my Hue Bridge weren’t made by Philips. Over time, I’d added IKEA TRÅDFRI and Innr bulbs, which generally worked well enough. Meanwhile, I’d started building a separate Zigbee network using Home Assistant, leaving me with two Zigbee networks in the same house.

With a Home Assistant Green (a dedicated device for running Home Assistant), a Home Assistant SkyConnect Zigbee coordinator (now sold as Connect ZBT-1) and an increasingly useful Zigbee mesh, I decided it was time to consolidate the lighting onto Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA).

The aim was straightforward: move the remaining devices to ZHA and retire the Hue Bridge.

Resetting and migrating the bulbs

The main task involved nine IKEA TRÅDFRI GU10 spotlights and an E14 candle bulb, together with several Innr bulbs.

For the IKEA bulbs, the process was to remove them from Hue, put ZHA into pairing mode and reset each bulb by switching its power on and off six times. This is IKEA’s documented factory reset procedure, although the timing took some experimentation. I had more success with very brief, momentary periods of power on, followed by longer periods of around a second with the power off. When the sequence worked, the bulb visibly changed brightness to indicate that it had reset.

To reconfigure the bulbs, I bought a GU10-to-B22 adapter so I could plug each spotlight into an ordinary bayonet lamp holder. That also meant I could work on the bulbs next to the Home Assistant Green and SkyConnect coordinator, reducing the distance involved during initial pairing.

After a lot of persistence and many failed attempts, I had most of the bulbs joined to ZHA. Once paired, I assigned them to the appropriate Home Assistant areas. I also wanted Home Assistant to check for IKEA firmware updates. ZHA supports over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, but the IKEA update provider isn’t enabled by default. To enable it, I added the following to my Home Assistant configuration.yaml:

zha:
  zigpy_config:
    ota:
      extra_providers:
        - type: ikea

After restarting Home Assistant, ZHA could check IKEA’s firmware feed for updates. Available updates appear through Home Assistant’s firmware update entities, where they can be reviewed and installed.

This doesn’t mean every bulb will have an update available, and it’s worth checking for known issues before installing one. Firmware updates can occasionally affect device behaviour, including Zigbee group functionality. The Home Assistant ZHA documentation explains the OTA functionality and its limitations.

One GU10 proved particularly troublesome. Despite repeated resets and various pairing attempts, ZHA discovered it but couldn’t complete the device interview. I eventually substituted another successfully paired bulb and put the troublesome one aside. It remains unresolved, although I’ll mention some of the techniques I tried later in this series.

Creating a Zigbee group for the loft room

Six of the GU10s are installed in my loft room, where I want them to behave as a single set of lights.

Home Assistant has the concept of areas, but an area isn’t the same as a Zigbee group. Areas organise devices within Home Assistant, whereas Zigbee groups allow compatible devices to receive group commands over the Zigbee network.

I created a group in ZHA and added the six spotlights, giving me a single light entity for switching and dimming the room rather than controlling six bulbs individually. This also provided a suitable target for the Philips Hue dimmer switch that I’d planned to migrate.

The last Innr bulb

The final bulb to migrate was an Innr bulb in my son’s bedroom. It had become unavailable in Hue, possibly because it was switched off when I changed the Hue Bridge’s Zigbee channel during troubleshooting.

I eventually recovered it using a TouchLink reset initiated by a Philips Hue dimmer switch, followed by ZHA’s option to add devices through a selected nearby Zigbee router. Both techniques were new to me, and I’ll explain how they work in the final post in this series, on Sunday.

With that last Innr bulb connected to ZHA, the remaining task was to migrate its dimmer switch.

Retiring the Hue Bridge

I now have the IKEA and Innr lighting on ZHA, apart from the single GU10 that refuses to complete pairing. Both Philips Hue dimmer switches have also moved across, with one controlling the loft room spotlights and the other controlling my son’s bedroom light.

The dimmer switches required more work than the bulbs, particularly to get the Off and brightness buttons behaving correctly. That’s the subject of the next post in this series, tomorrow.

There were more complications than I’d anticipated, but the result is what I wanted: one Zigbee network, managed through Home Assistant, with the lighting integrated alongside the rest of my smart home. The Hue Bridge is no longer needed and can finally be retired.