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.