Why and how I retired Huemagic

[dongennl]

Hi, just in case it helps anyone else, I've today migrated away from Huemagic, the complete lack of support and the (still) buggy connection to Hue are the main reasons. I totally understand Foddy may not have the time or interest to maintain or upgrade, but there are plenty of serious contributors in this group that could have been given rights to help and keep this alive.

Second, I had to restart node-red on an almost daily basis as it keeps losing the connection to my two Hue hubs after several hours/days. When I have visitors standing in dark bathrooms in multiple houses things get annoying.

I have now replaced this plugin with Home Assistant (HA) and node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket (note it requires some manual file installation) and it is rock solid and fast for many days already. I installed HA in a docker container and it automatically found my Hue bridges and all the lights & scenes; nothing else to do and no other logic is in HA. HA is purely for storing state and watching events and passing them to Node Red. HA uses the streaming interface to Hue.

Note that HA natively supports Hue, no plugin to install at HA end, the core HA team maintains the Hue integration, so this is not dependent on a single individual. As Node Red and HA communicate via web socket the response time from Hue is still fast; I don't notice a difference compared with Huemagic despite the extra step.

So, I still use Node Red for all logic and control, I just get the Hue events to/from Home Assistant, instead of using HueMagic; the node-red nodes for HA are actually very capable, you can even call multiple scenes in different rooms with a single node (no queueing problems here when you call many scenes at once).

It's super easy: use a HA 'call service' node to activate a Hue scene or switch off an area; use 'device' to catch button presses or motion events. They have drop downs for all the Hue values (from both my Hue hubs combined, which is nice)

I have not looked back, no more restarting, and I can still do everything I did before with HueMagic. Thanks & bye.

[uli-rpi]

+1

[jschroeter]

Thanks for sharing, just did the same after reading your post here. Since I had HA running already it didn't took long and everything seems to work fine.

[bond2k]

@dongennl Do you have some examples how to use the call service to switch on/off and change color? Edit: Ah I see. Turning on / off is not done via the hue service, but just the default 'light.turn_on' service where you can also set all the details like color, etc.

[andesse]

You can test my repository, it solves all problems https://github.com/andesse/HUE-CLIP-API.Node-RED-Flows

[uli-rpi]

Use Home Assistant or similar, it works out of the box with hue V 2.0 Api without any complex node red flows ....

[andesse]

Use Home Assistant or similar, it works out of the box with hue V 2.0 Api without any complex node red flows ....

Some people aren't using HA, what can I say? If the maintainer for the HA plug-in/addon stops maintaining, what are you doing then? Same happened here.

[uli-rpi]

The maintainer of hue magic is one person, and he is absent, the Hue Api V2 is constantly evolving, and without a active maintainer, this project ist dead.

For this reason i trust a worldwide community of HA rather than just one person.

[andesse]

The main functionality and the concept for HUE Api V2 will remain like this for many years, because it's brand new. HUE will not change the API reference.

If they do an update at any time I am updating my repo, cause I use it by myself.

But you can do and think what you want, use the easy out of the box way from HA.

[dongennl]

hi @bond2k sorry for delay; was away from my home; here are some screenshots for the 3 main activities managing Hue in Node Red via Home Assistant as I now use it:

(button trigger with Device Node)

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(activate a hue scene with Call Service node (multiple scenes at once), note transition parameter for fade time)

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(switch off hue light zone with Call Service, note transition parameter for fade time)

Hope it helps