I have found Hue to be a rare example of how IoT can be good, they have a pretty open platform using the bridge and api, with good quality if a little pricey product. Be great if hue made a devkit for the kind of projects in the post.
You missed the most important ones in my book: you don't need an account to use it and things work fine if you block its access outside your home network.
It also works find with other zigbee stuff (in both directions, you can pair MUCH cheaper Ikea bulbs to the Hue bridge, and pair Hue bulbs to other zigbee coordinators), even if they don't really advertise that.
This is a really annoying limitation that I genuinely don't understand the need for. It seems a really irritating place to throw up an arbitrary wall. If they're going to let me use the bulbs with their system in the first place, why cripple them by not bridging them to HomeKit with whatever level of functionality they already support them for?
I bought two cheaper bulbs and won't buy any more of those because of this. So I guess if the reason is "money grab" i have to grudgingly admit it was successful.
I've tried using other products that were "cheaper". They work at first, but then issues. First, I bought a compatible bulk LED strip. The listing suggested the power supply to use, but it was way too weak to push the entire strip. Luckily, I bought the strip to cut into sections for using in multiple places. The suggested power supply was still to weak for the smaller sections. Knowing how to calculate the draw per inch of strip length is imperative. Once that was done, the strip itself left a lot to be desired. I bought the proper controller for the RGBWW config, and once synced, the color settings would drift. I would set them in the Hue app, and once happy just forget about it and go about my day. After some time, the color would just be different. After some time, I noticed that one section of my strip had smoked all of the LEDs for one color. Luckily the did not result in a fire, but every LED in this section is clearly burned and obviously no longer working. The other LEDs in the RGBW are working still.
In the end, it would have been cheaper and less time consuming had I just bought the Philips Hue strips.
I did the underside of all our kitchen cupboards in CCT RGBW LEDs linked to a Hue bridge (nearly 5 metres split over three controllers and PSUs), I’m thankful I thoroughly researched the topic before buying anything as nearly a year on, I’ve never had a single issue with any of it.
The key learning from my research was to buy commercial grade PSUs and LEDs from a proper retailer that supplies industry and over spec the PSUs - if you calculate your LEDs need 40w, get something like a 60w PSU. I don’t think it cost significantly more than if I purchased cheap no name Chinese stuff off Amazon.
As a side note, I didn’t go for the Hue strips because the LEDs would have been a lot less bright, the cut points were far more restrictive and it also would have worked out more expensive.
I got a Sowilo LED Strip (the discontinued Bifröst-147, replaced by -168) with their recommended power supply and Hue Controller, and I couldn't be happier. Its advantage over Hue is that it's much brighter.
There is exactly one device on the market (that I have found) which seems to satisfy both sides of your interests here: a rotary dimmer by a somewhat obscure company called Martin Jerry which functions perfectly well as a dumb dimmer but also can be fully controlled as an iot device.
The only downside (apart from the idiosyncratic physical knob design) is that it's a tuya platform device, but the manufacturer also markets a DIY version which is trivially flashable to open source tasmota or ES32Home, severing the connection to the mothership entirely while retaining all functionality.
I have 3 Hue light bulbs + 3 IKEA Tradfri light bulbs ( + bunch of other zigbee stuff, in total ~40 devices in my mesh network)
I started home automation with a Philips Hue starter kit but built my own zigbee network with Home Assistant later on. I'd say IKEA light bulbs, being around half the price of Philips, are pretty much on par with them.
The worst lights I had were OSRAM, they kept losing the zigbee connection and were PITA all the time.
I’ve found the IKEA bulbs to be significantly worse than the Philips ones, so I would definitely say the price difference is warranted.
The IKEA bulbs aren’t as bright, get overwhelmed if you send a lot of commands quickly (so you can’t implement a dimmer for example, without the light jittering as it dims), and don’t have the “turn power on-and-off quickly to reset to full brightness” feature (though this is nice if that’s what you specifically want).
Not entirely relevant here, but Zigbee supports sending a duration to take for changes in configuration, which tends to lead to much smoother dims than brute forcing it. If applied to a group of bulbs it’ll also synchronise over the entire group.
I could have done with them not removing the perfectly functional and reliable Apple Watch support that I paid for just to update their app to shove ads about other products in my face. I spent too much on this setup to get spammed and lose features.
I got IKEA Tradfri controllers for my Hue "network" because I didn't want to always be looking for my phone and loading the app, they work although color changing isn't possible.
In theory you could get a Pi to host a website that talks to the Hue hub's REST API. Actually, I'd be surprised if such a thing doesn't exist on GitHub, but it could be a hunt to find one with has a more than decent UI.
I haven't tried it, but I believe you can even get them into bare zigbee mode, entirely disconnected from the Hue system. At which point, Home Assistant and similar systems can control them directly.
I mean, I'm sure there's worse out there.. but the fact that I have to wait for my phone to connected via bluetooth before I can turn on my lights is such bad UX, often taking multiple attempts to connect to all the lights.
Just let me flick the switch, and then turn the lights on as and when you manage to successfully connect, don't make me wait.
Connecting over BT is the worst possible way. If you really want to make heavy use of the bulbs you should really have a bridge and real remotes. Zigbee is much, much faster.
