Zigbee2MQTT Option?

General
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Hi there! I’ve been using Hue Essentials for a while and really been liking it! I have a Hue Bridge and a ConBee II stick, the latter of which is connected to my micro server. I’d been using deCONZ, but ran into issues with it not quite playing nice with my new CentraLite Pearl thermostat. Control was nonexistent within both deCONZ and Home Assistant.

Consequently, I ended up pivoting to Zigbee2MQTT, after reading that it had solid support, and it certainly seems to! I greatly like that pairing devices is much more straightforward as well; just permit joins and then all I have to do is reset a device or place it in pairing mode and it immediately joins the mesh without issue!

The downside is I can’t control this anymore in Hue Essentials. I paid for the multi-bridge feature because I liked the idea of managing deCONZ as well. Since I’ve ended up moving any devices I don’t care about having Hue Sync to z2m, my Hue Essentials functions have kind of fallen by the wayside.

Given that z2m can be controlled both by MQTT topic commands and via a websocket API if you use the frontend, is this something that Hue Essentials could add support for in the future? I really like the software, it’s certainly a more friendly front-end for adding scenes and the like, which z2m also supports.

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I have now also switched to Z2M for 2 weeks after a longer period of consideration. At the same time, I also switched to the Sonoff dongle. The reason was, several devices that are still not properly supported by deconz after a long time. For example, a pull request for my Silvercrest thermostats has been waiting for months to be merged so that the DDF file could work with deconz.
I was using the deconz addon from Home Assistant, where still is no easy way to manage these DDF files.

With Z2M everything now works from the beginning and I am glad, I switched. What I realized of course was that my 3 purchased Hue Essentials licenses (Windows, Google Play & Amazon) will no longer work with it.

Of course it would be cool, if the developers would realize a way to connect with Z2M. However, I don’t know how much effort that would be.

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Hi,

I also switched from a Deconz (Docker container) to a Zigbee2MQTT a long time ago.
Since hueessentials currently has no Zigbee2MQTT functionality I found a workaround for me.

  1. setup DiyHue docker container
  2. connect hueessentials with my DiyHue docker container
  3. connect DiyHue with my mqtt broker
  4. now i can control my lights with hueessentials :slight_smile:

Unfortunately currently only lamps work :frowning:

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having the ability to join z2m and HueEssentiald would be great!

HueEssentials is an easy way to add a lot of functionality to our Zigbee devices, so it‘s too bad it‘s not available for more platforms.

I‘ve also noticed that touchlink works a lot better in HueEssentials than in z2m

merging the two would be ideal

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Hello and yes, please implement a MQTT interface.
The DiyHue is from my point of view quite fiddly and not useful to make the chain even longer.

This would also attract more (paying) customers - like me, for example.