ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Philips has just announced that a new Hue bridge will be available tomorrow. It will be compatible with Apple HomeKit and we can use Siri to control the lights. The new bridge will replace the old bridge and work with all of our existing Hue lights. They have implemented a migration feature that will migrate all of the data and settings from the old bridge over to the new one. However, once the migration is performed, the old bridge will be wiped to restore it's factory settings. It seems that we will have 2 hours to "undo" the migration if something goes wrong.
How appropriate that my new Apple HomeKit Philips Hue Bridge 2.0 arrived today -- providing voice control -- at least for a few happy minutes. Then the problems came crashing down.
For the good news: the voice control worked. The Hue iOS app transferred all of the settings from the old bridge over to the new bridge painlessly. All that was needed on the MLGW was to replace the IP address of the old Hue bridge with the IP address of the new Hue bridge and all control of the lights through the MLGW worked just as before. All of the custom strings continued to work perfectly without the need for any changes. I set up Siri control of the lights with my iPad. It worked! I could bark commands such as "Turn the lights on," "Turn the lights off," or "Dim the lights to 50%" and HomeKit responded as told. While Hue claimed that you could also tell Siri to set the lights to particular Scenes, this did not work yet.
This worked fine -- for a few minutes. Then, when I tried to also pair my iPhone for Siri control, everything fell apart and stopped working. One then gets an error message on BOTH iOS devices saying that another iOS device has already paired for HomeKit and that you need that device to allow permission. However, there are no instructions on just HOW you do this. I contacted Hue and they admitted that this is a problem that they are working on. They admitted that people encounter this problem when they try to use more than one iOS device with HomeKit. Whether this is a problem on Apple's end or Hue's end is questionable. It seems that Apple HomeKit is still in its infancy and needs a lot of work ironing out the bugs. Hue failed to enable a way to clear any HomeKit pairing with the bridge to even try a fresh pairing. This would seem easy enough to do by requiring a pressing of the pairing button on the bridge to clear the setting. Hue promised that they are working on a solution, but until then, Siri control is dead.
Update:
There was a power outage and when the power restored, the new Hue bridge reverted BACK to the IP address of the old Hue bridge. This required changing the IP address in the MLGW accordingly.
Also, Philips stil has not fixed the bug that causes HomeKit to lose its pairing with new Hue bridge. There is no way to restore the pairing! This has been a widespread problem among many Hue users, who have been complaining to Philips. People have been reporting that not even a factory reset of the Hue Bridge resolves the problem. Beware of upgrading to the new Hue bridge for now.
Our Hue kit went back for a refund after it blew up a power socket throwing a flame at me when I tried to install it a while back. Not the first problematic Philips product I've owned.
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Simonbeo: Our Hue kit went back for a refund after it blew up a power socket throwing a flame at me when I tried to install it a while back. Not the first problematic Philips product I've owned.
Hmm, It's a wonder we don't have more problems with our Bang & Olufsen products then given they are all just Philips devices in fancy enclosures
Martin.
PS. For anyone encountering this post who is not familiar with B&O please let me make it very clear that the above comment is intended to be sarcastic! (I'd hate to be responsible for further spreading this myth) - the 'Philips' thing is, amongst some of the audiophile community, a commonly quoted misconception (aside from a small number of historic products).
The good news is that Hue finally fixed the problem with home kit. There is now a JSON command to reset homekit on the Hue bridge. Doing this reset does not lose all of the light and scene settings. However, this option is still not on the iOS app. You must manually enter the JSON command through your computer.
Controlling the lights with Siri now works. You can bark commands into the Apple Watch such as "Hey, Siri. Turn the lights on" or "Hey, Siri. Set the lights to 50%."
The bad news: For some ridiculous reason, Hue has limited the lights in a scene that homekit can control to only 12. Most of my light scenes have been set to globally control all of the lights in my loft condo. There does not seem to be any logic to this 12 light limitation since the JSON command for setting a scene does not include the number of lights.
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