TLDR: I feel like I wasted a day of my life over the Hue terms and conditions change, and am not convinced that the terms & conditions change panic was worth my time (…and I still “lost”, as I gave in to it). Perhaps you can commiserate with my frustration, or if you’re feeling charitable, tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Long story: Like many of you, I own & operate about a dozen Hue light bulbs, and for many years. Unlike many of you, I am completely new to home assistant; I’ve never used it before. But, reading about the terms & conditions change for Philips Hue, I bought into the hyperbole, and decided I would do something about it.
I bought a Sonoff “P” zigbee dongle, and plugged it into my Unraid server. I set up Home Assistant (first in Docker, then in VM). I tried zigbee2mqtt and/or ZHA back-and-forth several times.
This stuff is NOT user-friendly. Home Assistant wasn’t a terrible experience; it is confusing, but it found & behaved well with most of the stuff in my house… except for those damn light bulbs. Perhaps I’m merely mediocre for this community, but I am easily the most technically savvy person I know in real life, and this was an exercise in frustration just for a dozen light bulbs.
Neither z2m nor zha was ever as good as the Philips hub. Maybe it was my dongle, or the extension cable, or a myriad of other variables I never had to consider with the Philips hub. ZHA was much easier to setup, but it was SLOW, requiring 4 full seconds to change a bulb 10 feet away, and that was when it worked. z2m never found all my bulbs, though its setup was so user-unfriendly it’s possible I was doing something wrong. I don’t think I ever got either system fully set up how I wanted it to be, and I just gave up after hours and hours of frustration. Because my wife expects this stuff to “just work,” I reluctantly went back to the Hue hub and… I had everything reconnected and restored in under an hour. And then, I laughed till I cried–setting up the Philips Hub in home assistant took 10 seconds.
There’s probably a better community than this for my frustration–as it’s not with HA but rather the light bulbs–but perhaps this community can tell me what I’m doing wrong. The idea of a fancy dongle to control my light bulbs without giving in to “the man” is still tempting, but it really needs to just work.
The Philips TOS change was the reason I got into Home Assistant. I have the Sonoff ZBdongle-P, which was pre-flashed and uses ZHA. I had an absolutely flawless experience in using that instead of the Hue Bridge so far. Sure, the initial setup took a while but now the lights work without any hiccups whatsoever. Some lights which had problems connecting to the grid with the Hue Bridge before now work even better. Sorry to hear about your experience.
About Home Assistant in general, a lot of research was involved until I got the basics of automation, sensor setup and yaml configuration. I’m controlling stuff like a weather station, my espresso machine states, TV and Amp, and a bunch of environmental sensors. Some of the concepts can feel a little odd at first, but I’m very happy how the whole system turned out. I used OpenHab in the past and that was a much, much worse experience.
I’m really glad it’s working out for you. I have mine still all set up, using the hue hub, but I’m not sure I have a real compelling need to use anything HA offers, yet. It just sits there.
I wanted to start a new home automation project for fun and tried to minimize dedicated hardware requirements.And also to do it in a way that no cloud services are needed and everything including the vacuum robot runs locally.
But you are right, if you’re happy with your setup, no need for a change and I guess the TOS change only concerns the Hue App, not the hub.