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Philips Zigbee (Hue) issue

Hi,

This question might be a little bit off, but not to far off for this forum I hope.

I am considering the nRF52840 Dongle to gain a better understanding of a issue with the earlier versions of Philips Hue system (Zigbee), before it was called Hue.

Philips in 2015 changed the firmware in their Hue Hubs. The newer firmware "Blocks" Philips earlier version of the products from the Hue system. This is described in many threads on the Hue development forums.

e.g. https://developers.meethue.com/content/livingcolors-gen2-almost-working

As I recently bought a Hue Bridge to connect the products to the bridge i found this extremely annoying as I can not understand why the products are behaving the way they are.

My intention is to link the Hue Bridge to my openHABian setup on a Rasberry pi 3 b, but as it can not link the Philips products to the Hue Bridge I am stuck. 

So my questions are:

1. Will the nRF52840 Dongle be able to sniff the Zigbee signals in any way? And will it help me if I get the data transferred? I have never worked with Zigbee or other 2.4 protocols.

2. Can it function as a temporary remote, creating a link between the lights and the hue bridge?

3. Can it function as a permanent link between the raspberry pi and the lights?

4. Are there any other smart ways to work around the issue of Philips "blocking" the older Zigbee signals? 

This issue has annoyed a number of people according to various forums, so any help in understanding what might fix this would be appreciated. And if it can not be fixed, it would be interesting to know why it doesn't work. I understand that no one can answer to why Philips changed their firmware in the way that they did.

On the technical side the initial link appears to function as the command to the HUE API

 {"touchlink": true}

returns 

[
{
"success": {
"/config/touchlink": true
}
}
]

And blinking lights, but no permanent link between the lights and the Hue Hub.

Thanks in advance. 

Parents
  • Hi,

    1. We have a Thread based sniffer that works with Wireshark. It can decode 802.15.4 packets, so I suppose it should be possible to decode Zigbee packets as well if Wireshark is setup correctly, but I have not tested this. I don't know if you will be able to see any usefull information with the sniffer.
    2. Are the Philips device authorized into the Zigbee network where the Hue Hub operates? You can only join one network. I'm not familiar with Hue Hub, but why should it accept packets from the nRF52840 device if the Philips device is "blocked"?
    3. Are you planning to use the nRF52840 device as a Zigbee "dongle" for the RPi? There is currectly no examples available for controlling the Zigbee stack from a RPi. You can send commands over UART etc. and forward this on the Zigbee network, but this is something you will have to implement yourself.
    4. This is something you should ask Philips, or in a home automation forum.

    Best regards,
    Jørgen

Reply
  • Hi,

    1. We have a Thread based sniffer that works with Wireshark. It can decode 802.15.4 packets, so I suppose it should be possible to decode Zigbee packets as well if Wireshark is setup correctly, but I have not tested this. I don't know if you will be able to see any usefull information with the sniffer.
    2. Are the Philips device authorized into the Zigbee network where the Hue Hub operates? You can only join one network. I'm not familiar with Hue Hub, but why should it accept packets from the nRF52840 device if the Philips device is "blocked"?
    3. Are you planning to use the nRF52840 device as a Zigbee "dongle" for the RPi? There is currectly no examples available for controlling the Zigbee stack from a RPi. You can send commands over UART etc. and forward this on the Zigbee network, but this is something you will have to implement yourself.
    4. This is something you should ask Philips, or in a home automation forum.

    Best regards,
    Jørgen

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