IFTTT is a free platform that helps you do more with all your apps and devices. Make your life easier by connecting Philips Hue with IFTTT. Create fun, relevant and personal Applets for your Philips Hue lights. Since 2015, StudioHue has been the premier mobile arts venue bringing the pARTy to craftes in downtown Buffalo and across WNY. It's the go-to place for bachelorettes, team building events, birthday, girls night out - there's always a reason to pARTy! Party Penguins Knit PJ Set Product Description Style PJ201506 HUE Printed Knit Tee and Pant 3 Piece Pajama set is a banded cozy three piece pajama set, perfect for gifting! Nightlife in Hue can hardly be described as scintillating. It's been said that the raciest thing about it is when the police show up and the illegal street vendors disappear like dust into thin air. Still, if your scene is a few quiet drinks hanging out with backpackers and/or locals then there's no reason why nights out in Hue shouldn't be loads of fun.

UPDATE 2/10/18: Hue has announced that it is upgrading all first and second generation Hue Hubs to support Zigbee 3.0. This will expand the ecosystem of third party products that will work with Hue. After the upgrade is rolled out, Hue will continue to support the bulbs listed below using the Zigbee Light Link standard, as well as new bulbs that use Zigbee 3.0. I will keep this article updated as new products are supported.

Philips Hue has long been one of the better and more versatile options for DIY smart lighting on the market. They offer a wide range of products from colored bulbs, to light strips, to white bulbs and ambient lighting. The problem is that Hue bulbs tend to be very expensive, easily costing 20x more that a standard LED bulb.

I’ve already written about how you can score great deals on the Hue Lux Starter Kit if you shop around. What many people don’t know is that Hue works with a number of other manufacturer’s bulbs right out of the box. While even 3rd party bulbs can still cost $15-$50, it can still save you a ton of money over buying regular Hue bulbs. These third party bulbs are generally just as capable as Hue bulbs but for 25-50% less money.

How It Works

Hue uses the ZigBee protocol to communicate. ZigBee is an open source standard for wireless communication used mainly in smart home products, and it is one of the most popular standards used in smart lighting. If you have a Hue Bridge set up, you’re already good to go. If not, you’ll need to have a Hue Bridge on your home network before you can add any 3rd party bulbs to your Hue ecosystem.

The downside here is that not all ZigBee devices are compatible. For one reason or another companies decide that they want to block their products from communicating with other ZigBee products. Usually companies will cite security concerns, but in reality, it’s normally because they want to force you to buy more of their products. Thankfully, Philips has developed the “Friends of Hue” program, and by extension, has also decided to work with a number of major manufacturers to make their bulbs work with Hue.

The 3rd Party Bulbs

At this time, there are quite a few companies that make bulbs that work with Hue. Before we get into the name brands, a little aside. Despite its long history, the smart home market as we know it is still in its infancy. There are many reputable companies, like Philips, churning out fantastic, well made products that make our lives easier. Those products can cost a lot of money. That said, there are now many companies, mostly Chinese and Korean, that are flooding the market with cheaper alternatives to name brand products. They’re not necessarily knockoffs, but products that perform the same or similar tasks at a significantly lower price.

In this case, there are a number of light bulbs that will work with Hue, made by these off-brand “companies” (many don’t even have a company name, they’re just a product listing). Having tested a couple, I can say that they’re generally cheaply made and the light quality and dimming options pale in comparison to even the cheapest name brand bulbs. I have said it numerous times, but it’s worth repeating; home automation is an expensive hobby. You often get what you pay for. I can’t stop you from buying these products, but I’d advise against it.

The most notable name brand bulbs that work with Hue are GE Link, Ikea Trådfri, Cree Connected and Sylvania Smart+ (aka Osram Lightify, aka Silvania Lightify)*. These companies sell quality smart bulbs that will work with Hue out of the box. By out of the box I mean that just like a new Hue bulb, if you turn on one of these bulbs and search for new bulbs in your Hue app, you should be able to quickly and easily connect them to your Hue Bridge.

*A note about pricing: I provide links to Amazon because Amazon pays me to do so. While I generally enjoy making money, I caution you that Amazon sellers of all smart home products like to play with the prices. On any given day, the bulbs linked above will cost between $15 and $40 per bulb. I highly recommend tracking the price or shopping around. You can find all of these bulbs from $12-15/bulb at Amazon or big box stores on the right day.

Pairing 3rd Party Bulbs

Cree, Sylvania and GE would have you believe that it takes a team of engineers with protractors and other nerd related gear to pair their bulbs with Hue. I’m here to tell you that it is a much simpler process than these companies let on. Here is my never fail* six step process to adding third party bulbs to Hue

1. Install one new bulb in the light or fixture of your choice.
2. TURN THE LIGHT ON! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD REMEMBER TO TURN THE LIGHT ON!
3. Open your Hue app and go to Settings -> Light Setup and click the + button to add a new bulb.
4. Hit the Search button to search for your new bulb.
5. OPTIONAL: If the search fails
   1. Re-read step 2 and make sure your new bulb is turned on!
   2. If the bulb was turned on and the search still can’t find it, click “Add serial number.” Locate the six character serial number on your bulb and search again
6. Repeat as necessary

*A note on processes that never fail: So long as you keep repeating this process until it works, it will work or you will die trying.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a savvy shopper you can light new areas of your home, while still using your existing Hue app and integrations, for a fraction of the cost of buying all Hue products. So long as you stick to reputable products, you will not be disappointed.

I have been on a bit of a smart lighting journey over the past year. I originally disliked the idea of smart lighting, before buying a couple of smart lights here and there – and really liking them. I now have a range of smart lights, including a homemade ZigBee lightstrip and a Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus.

Whilst I like Hue’s lightstrips overall, I dislike how inflexible they can be: any off-cuts are hard to re-use, even with the latest (V4) generation which market them as being re-usable. Part of the reason for this is how Philips Hue offer the all-important controller.

The Philips Hue controller cannot be purchased separately, meaning that any off-cuts can’t be re-used unless you buy a brand new base kit. There are some options open to you, but none are as practical as Hue simply selling the controller separately.

Philips Hue’s lightstrips – and why the controller is so important

Smart LED lightstrips are a pretty neat invention: they are fairly small, meaning they can be installed in a range of places – including behind TVs, under cabinets and even under couches and beds. You can then change their color, brightness and on/off state in a smart way – using an app, your voice or automated schedules.

Philips Hue’s Lightstrips are one of the most expensive smart lightstrips on the market, rivalling LIFX on price and generally offering a high quality set of colors and brightnesses:

But it’s not just the color and brightness that matters: how well the lightstrip is controlled matters too. In other words, when changing from one color to another, do the colors just ‘snap’ straight from blue to orange (for example)? Or do they provide a nice, seamless transition?

As you can see from my video above, Philips Hue’s color changes are seamless. This is due to having a good quality controller.

What is a lightstrip controller?

Many LED lightstrips are fairly low power: Philips Hue’s runs at 24V and 0.83A, for example, meaning they run at just under 20W. However mains power is much higher than this: anything from 120-240V depending on where you live in the world.

Hence an LED controller’s first – and arguably most important – function is often to act as a transformer, taking mains voltage and dialing it down to an acceptable voltage for the lightstrip.

But with smart lightstrips, the controller must do more than just be a transformer:

• Dial down the voltage further to support dimming (i.e. brightness changes). When you dim your LED lightstrips, this will alter the amount of electricity consumed – and your controller is what drives this.
• Regulatehow much power is sent to each ‘pin’ for color changes. Smart lightstrips are RGB, meaning they can be set to loads of different colors. When you chose a light orange color, the pins responsible for red and white will receive more power than some of the other pins.
  If you chose a white color, the RGB (red, green, blue) pins may receive no power – and hence not come on. Whereas the pin(s) responsible for the white LEDs will receive more power and come on brightly.
• Speak the correct ‘language‘. Some smart lightstrips work over WiFi, whereas some (including Philips Hue’s lightstrips) work over Zigbee. The controller is responsible for receiving commands over these protocols, understanding them, and then changing the color (or brightness) accordingly.

Is the Philips Hue controller the best?

So clearly the controller in a smart LED lightstrip is really important, which brings me onto my next point: whether it’s worth caring about Philips Hue’s controller. By this I mean – if you have an off-cut of Hue’s lightstrips (or another third party light strip), should you go out and try and get the official Hue controller to use with it?

As it happens, the Philips Hue controller is pretty darn good. The color matching is very high quality, meaning that if you had two lightstrips in a room:

• A Hue Lightstrip off-cut, attached to a third party Zigbee controller.
• A Hue Lightstrip attached to the official Hue controller.

You will notice a difference in the colors produced from both.

The other difference you’ll notice is when changing between colors: the transitions are often a lot smoother with Hue’s own lightstrip and controller.

Why being able to buy just the Hue controller would be awesome

As I’ve touched on so far, if you have a bunch of Hue Lightstrip off-cuts, you’ll probably want to re-use them. The easiest way of doing this would be to go out and buy a Hue controller, and hook the lightstrip up to this – right?

Unfortunately Philips Hue don’t sell the Lightstrip Plus controller separately, meaning that any off-cuts you use can’t be “re-used” – unless you own yet another base kit.

This is annoying because you may have quite a long run of off-cut, and the last thing you’ll want to do is go out and spend $80 on another Hue Lightstrip base kit – especially since this will come with another 2m/78″ run of LED light strips.

If you just wanted to re-use a 50″ off-cut, you’re now stuck with 50+78″ = 128″ of Philips Hue Lightstrips – purely so you can get another Hue controller!

This is why people often look at third party controllers to re-use their Hue lightstrip off-cuts – something which I explore later on – but first a quick word on the V4 Hue Lightstrips…

Doesn’t the V4 Hue Lightstrips allow “cutting and re-using”?

Philips Hue’s fourth generation Lightstrip Plus proudly marketed that they can be extended and re-used:

The leftover piece won’t go to waste: use the included connector clip to attach the strip you’ve cut off to another Lightstrip base unit!

Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus V4 marketing

And this is true. The V4 lightstrip comes with the following hippo connector style block:

This allows you to take two Hue Lightstrips and join them together – meaning that you can re-use a Hue off-cut.

However as mentioned above, this requires a brand new base kit to be purchased – you can’t just buy a Hue controller and re-use an off-cut that way.

As a result, if you’re unwilling to buy a new base-kit, you may want to explore using third party controllers.

Can you use a third party controller with Hue’s Lightstrips?

In theory, yes you can buy a third party Zigbee controller and use this with Philips Hue Lightstrip off-cuts. However there are some caveats here:

1. Hue’s lightstrips run at 24V, hence you need to ensure that any third party controller also runs at this. Some only run at 12V, for example, which may lead to the Hue Lightstrip frequently cutting out or malfunctioning.
2. The color matching and transitions won’t be as good as using the official Hue controller. I mentioned this earlier, but Hue made some specific color choices with their own controller that is hard to replicate with third party controllers.
   Having said that, as long as you aren’t running different lightstrip controllers in the same room and grouping them together, this probably won’t matter all that much.

Okay, with that said – the Hue lightstrips end with a 6 pin connector (the one at the top comes from the Hue lightstrip):

This is designed to plug seamlesseley into the Hue controller (the bottom device), but there’s no reason why you can’t buy a compatible Zigbee controller and wire this up.

There’s two key points here though:

Philips Hue Party Mode

• The Zigbee controller must also be 6 pin, also sometimes called RGB+CCT. This means that full control of white colors is available. A 5 pin controller (such as an RGB+WW one) will not be compatible.
• The V1-V3 Hue lightstrips use a standard 6-pin adapter, whereas the latest V4 Hue lightstrip uses a micro 6-pin adapter (shown above). As a result, you need to ensure that you buy the correct connectors to go be able to join your Hue Lightstrip to the controller.

Philips Hue Party

Unfortunately there’s almost infinite possibilities here, so I won’t cover this much further. To be honest, if you’re confident with soldering, you just need to ensure that you have some 6-pin wire and a compatible 6-pin (RGB-CCT) Zigbee controller and you’re good to go:

Hue Party App Not Working

But if you’re not confident with soldering and you can’t find suitable connectors, you may want to look at alternative lightstrips. I cover a range of Zigbee-based lightstrips in another article, and to be honest all options are easier than trying to re-use a Hue Lightstrip off-cut with a third party controller!