The Smart Home Project

Philips Hue bulbs are fantastic and hugely flexible when paired with the Hue Bridge. Out of the box the accessories support a range of features and will do most of what people want. However, if you are prepared to go a little bit deeper with them and use the built-in Hue Bridge API, you can get very sophisticated lighting automation and other information. For example, the Rules engine in the Hue Bridge allows for rules to be triggered by other rules and events and they also allow you to set any action for any button press on their accessories (e.g. successive presses of the same button on a tap switch can dim the scene or cycle through as many scenes as you want). Something that Philips doesn't shout about is that their motion sensors also have temperature and lux sensors that you can query - also very useful. So what's the problem? Well, the Philips Hue app and integrations with Amazon Alexa, Google Home Assistant, etc., assume that you have exactly 1 Hue Bridge. I guess that ...

I made the decision that we would use consumer tech in our Smart Home (see this post) and the lighting system we settled on was Philips Hue. I will explain why we went for Philips Hue over other possibilities in another post at some point. However, when using a system like Philips Hue (or any of the others with their own controllers) there is a choice between performing the automation natively in the system controller, doing it within a central control system (like Home Assistant) or some form of hybrid.  In my experience, there is always a slight (but noticeable) delay if trying to perform all the automations within the central controller. I know that some of this comes from the particular platforms that are being integrated, e.g. the Philips Hue integration polls the Hue Bridge rather than accepting push notifications for motion sensors, etc. However, there is a second issue; namely, what happens if my central controller is offline for some reason? If my Home Assistant machine f...