If you don't mind sharing, what sort of problems did you have?
From: viphone@googlegroups.com [mailto:viphone@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of pholdstock Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2016 12:49 PM To: viphone@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Philips Hue Lights - first impressions I'm glad to hear it's going well. Just a word of warning that if you do you have any problems, which I did further down the line, do not do a factory reset by pushing the button on the bridge as this has caused me significant problems and I still don't have my lights working. I've tried numerous fixes and cannot get my phone to connect to the bridge at all. It recognises it when the app searches for the bridge but pressing the button on the bridge has no effect. I'm also told that after doing a factory reset, you have to manually input the codes for all of your bulbs which means I'm going to have to ask someone cited to do that and it's going to take awhile. So far, Phillips haven't been too helpful. Peter Sent from my iPhone On 4 Dec 2016, at 17:18, Sieghard Weitzel <siegh...@live.ca<mailto:siegh...@live.ca>> wrote: Hi, Thought I post a few thoughts about the Philips Hue lights I recently purchased. To start out with I can say that both my wife and I are very impressed and happy with how this system works. I am the sort of guy who likes to read as few instructions as possible when it comes to setting up these type of gadgets. When I received the stuff I put in all the light bulbs and then connected the bridge and downloaded the app. As soon as I opened it I was guided through the setup quite nicely, but hit a bit of a snag when I was told that in order to set up Home Kit integration I had to either scan an 8-digit “Home Kit Code” or enter it manually. The app said the code was in the packaging or on the accessory. I asked my wife to look and she did see it on the bottom of the bridge and also I think in the little booklet that came in the box, but for some reason it wouldn’t scan and since it’s only 8 digits I just quickly entered it manually. What I thought wasn’t explained too well was how to set up the individual lights and rooms, it’s fairly intuitive, but the app said to make sure all lights were turned on which means to make sure the actual wall switch was on so they have power because of course if a light is turned off at the wall switch it is not available to be controlled and the idea is to leave the wall switches on and to turn on the lights either by telling SIRI to turn them off or you can very easily use the Home app to do this and once Home integration is set up there actually is a third page when you pull up the control centre which can show up to 9 accessories and you can turn lights on or off simply by tapping on the light you want to control and it turns on or off, if you swipe down or up (rotor action) you get a “Show More Controls” and this opens up a screen where you have a slider where you can flick up and down and control the brightness, from 100% all the way down to I think 2%. Anyhow, back to the setup. When I turned on all the lights they all showed up with the name of the bulb model, e.g. Philips Hue White” or “Philips Hue Ambient White” etc. The problem was that I have 6 of the ambient white and 3 of the just white and I had no way to figure out which light was where. I then decided to turn off all lights with their wall switch and only leave on, for example, the hallway light where I happen to have just one of the 3 white bulbs. Once Idid this all lights shows as offline except for this one and I then went ahead and renamed it “Hallway”. Then I turned on the light at my front door/entry way. Here are two white bulbs and I didn’t really care which one was which and I just called them Front Door 1 and Front Door 2. Then I did the Kitchen where I have a lamp over the dining table, a 3-bulb fixture in the middle and a 2-bulb fixture over the sink area. I only had enough bulbs to put in one over the sink and 2 in the middle and by using the same method as before I named them Dining table, Kitchen 1 and Kitchen 2 and Kitchen Sink 1. Lastly I did the bedroom where I have 1 bulb in the ceiling fixture and 1 in my wife’s bedsight lamp, I called them Bedroom Ceiling and Jackie’s Lamp. Once that was done I was easily able to group, for example Front Door 1 and Front Door 2 into a room I called “Front Door”, similarly I grouped Kitchen 1 and Kitchen 2 together as “Kitchen”. Interestingly enough I looked all over the place in the Philips Hue app and could not really find any place where you can turn the lights on or off. I think the app is primarily for setup, you can setup your rooms, SIRI voice control, create scenes (or pick from existing ones) and so on. I haven’t played around with the scenes a lot yet, but they are things like “Bright”, “Read”, “Nightlight”, “Energize” etc. If you have ambient white bulbs you get things like “Tropical Twilight”, “Savanna Sunset” etc. and if you have the colour bulbs you can do even more as they can do 16 million colours. I then tried to set up my wife’s iPhone to work with SIRI and then realized that once I connected the Hue bridge to her phone that it disconnected it from mine, e.g. SIRI voice control was only working either on my phone or on hers. I then decided to do a bit of reading and learned that I had to make sure it was working on mine and then I can invite/share people to use it. The article I read also mentioned that the ideal setup is to use an iPad or Apple TV as a hub. Since we do have an Apple TV Fourth Generation I set that up this morning, I just had to make sure I was signed in with the same iCloud email as I use on my phone and now that this is all done I was able to invite my wife, she accepted and I gave her full permissions so now we can both use SIRI to turn lights on or off, we can do this even if we aren’t home and we can also both use the Home app where it is a simple matter of double tapping on any particular light or room to turn it on or off, or as I said before, we can just swipe up to bring up the Control Centre and toggle the lights on or off there. For me using SIRI is easiest, my wife is Filipina and SIRI sometimes still has trouble understanding her accent, but now with Control Centre it’s pretty easy to control the lights as well. I bought the White Ambient starter kit which comes with the bridge, two bulbs and a wireless remote. This remote is about the size of the Apple TV 4th gen remote and has four large buttons one on top of another. The bottom one is off, the top on is on and the middle is a rocker switch which acts as a dimmer, top is up which means increase brightness and bottom is decrease brightness. You can configure this remote in the Hue app to control either the entire home or up to two rooms, but you can also choose a single room. You can also configure the top button to do different things for up to 5 quick presses, for example, a single press would turn the light on in the kitchen on full brightness, a double press would turn on the “Relax” scene, a triple press the Night Light scene etc. These wireless remotes come with a magnetic wall plate which you can either stick to a wall with double sided tape or, in my case, I just stuck it to the fridge for now and the little remote then in turn sticks to the plate magnetically or you can take it off and bring it with you. You can get as many of these as you want, they are only $24.99 here in Canada, so I assumme maybe $19.99 in the States, you can then basically have a remote for each room, maybe have one stuck by the front door, one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom etc. There is also a so-called tap switch which as opposed to the remote doesn’t even need a battery, it somehow uses kinnetic energy, but it is $49.99 and you can similarly program it to perform several actions. There is also a new motion sensor available which would turn on the light when it senses motion and I assume you can program it to turn off after a certain amount of time, this could be useful in a utility room or laundry room without windows where you would always want the light to come on when you walk in, stay on as long as you are there and turn off a few minutes after no motion is detected. You can also set up automation based on other things, for example, you could set up the lights so they all turn off when your iPhone is out of range of the house, I think it uses a geofence for this. Similarly, if you had a smartlock which was Home Kit enabled, you could set up the lights so they would come on as soon as you unlock the lock. Like I said, this is very slick, I think the fact that Philips has been doing this for I think at least 4 or 5 years shows, the current bridge is the second generation and the bulbs you can now get are just starting on their third generation which means they are brighter and the colour bulbs reproduce colours apparently a lot more accurately as before. There are many other options out there, but not all are Home Kit enabled and for me that was definitely a factor. Philips Hue, by the way, also supports control via Google Home, Amazon Echo and Nest. This shows that it is very possible for a manufacturer to have a product which supports not just one or two of the major standards but allof them. Regards, Sieghard -- The following information is important for all members of the V iPhone list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your V iPhone list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com<mailto:caraqu...@caraquinn.com> The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<mailto:viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. 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