Best practice for combining a hue network and a Zigbee network

Hi,

I already have around 20 hue-devices connected to the hue bridge and are currently starting with a conbee stick also adding some zigbee sensors, currently on a separate network. Is it somehow possible ot combine these two networks as hue is afaik also just the default zigbee protocol, this would enhance the mesh-functionality as he hue bulbs are already spreaded around my home.
On the same side I would not like to miss the GUI from he Hue app, so just connecting everything to the conbee/deconz network without having the hue app in place wouldn’t really help.

Yes, you can connect all you HUE bulbs to het conbee and use the HUE app. You don’t need the hue bridge anymore. The HUE app supports conbee (https://www.hueessentials.com/#h.p_vN2p6rleIMkW)

The only way to get all devices in the same mesh is to use one gateway/bridge/coordinator.
Conbee/deconz is one way to do it.
I believe the zigbee binding does not support the conbee-stick fully (yet?).
If you end up with two gateways/bridges/coordinators, best practice is to use separate channels for them.

The Hue app will only work with the Hue bridge.
The Hueesentials app works with deconz (and others).
Personally I do not find those apps helpful for more than the basics.

So, you have to choose :slight_smile:

You are mixing things up here…

A network can only have one coordinator, but it can have multiple gateways - so long as they join the network as a router - not a coordinator.

Therefore, I would have expected that other controllers can join the Hue gateway - I’ve personally never tried this, and don’t have a Hue controller to be able to try it even, but technically it’s possible assuming the Hue gateway doesn’t prevent this (I’m not sure that it can even, but sometimes organisations like to exclude this sort of functionality to protect their own ecosystem).

Currently the ZigBee binding would not support this mode, but it could technically be modified to do this relatively easily (there is a variant of the binding that works in this way for a commercial system).

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I stand corrected :slight_smile:

Interesting as it is, I will not try to add a gateway to my Hue mesh as I find the Hue bridge limited.
The worst bottleneck is that all devices has to be polled (Hue API limitation).
Next is device compatibility
So I slowly migrate my devices over to the zigbee binding.
One (big for me) downside with deconz is the extra “layer” and the added complexity that follows.

But this is a limitation of the Hue system - not ZigBee, so it’s not applicable if you were to connect a separate gateway into the Hue network.

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Thanks for your answers. Yes the Hue bridge and app only works for basic things, but basic is perfect for other family members. :wink:

So for now I’ll stay with the two networks in parallel and slowly switch over to conbee/deconz, as soon as my manually built-interface are also better and more reliable then the hue app.

OpenHab has a separate Deconz binding. To me the stick looks fully supported. Even groups that I created with Deconz are available as a separate channel.

@airbone42 If you want to keep it basic to your family members, you could use homebridge-hue to expose both Deconz and HueBridge additionally to iOS devices and let them use HomeKit for basic tasks. More complex features and rules can still be done with OpenHab running in the back.

'yes, but not the native openhab zigbee binding: https://www.openhab.org/addons/bindings/zigbee/