Honestly, they could go just a tiny bit dimmer, but other than that, they're awesome and really tie the room together. Highly recommend!!

I want to use this wake up automation as it says it uses sunrise colors but it doesn't turn the lights on. I have a bridge so I can have it turn the lights on low 1% but Im not sure the wake up automation takes control after that. I've never used Hue light bulbs before and I'm a little lost.

How do I get my light bulbs to turn on and act like a sunrise lamp from a deeper orange red to lighter yellow?

I’m new and looking to get into the Philips Hue ecosystem, starting with smart bulbs for my bedroom ceiling light.

My main goal right now is to create a sunrise wake-up effect that gradually brightens my room in the morning. I’m trying to decide whether investing in the Bridge Pro and premium bulbs now makes more sense than starting cheaper and upgrading later.

I do wanna expand later in the future with adding back lights to my TV and possibly more lights in my living room, but I’m still divided between the cheaper option of Govee and the more expensive route of Phillips. For simplicity, though I would just like to stick to one lighting brand rather than having to switch between different apps and adjusting lights around the house

I found a guy on Etsy making exactly what i needed. Not sure if it is permissible to list his details in this group. He 3D prints shades for the A19 60W and 75W bulbs. And as far as I know he's going to start making them for the new 100W bulb which is about 1" taller that it's lower aatt companions. He also makes a shade extension so you can get a brighter wall washer effect without blinding yourself. Just wanted to give a shout out for this guy because this is so exactly what I was looking for.

I am having an issue consistently with my Philips Hue Play-box and my Apple 4K TV, where the screen will go to this message every 20-30 minutes. I have my Play-box connected to the TV with the Apple 4K TV plugged into the HDMI 2 on the play-box, yet it still gives me trouble. Has anyone encountered this before? It’s set on input signal plus and still does it. I have a Samsung TV.

I can seem to set up my Sync Box. After following all instructions I end up with a error message on my Hue app that says that the Sync box and the Hue Bridge arn't connected to the same WiFi network. I'm not sure the reason for this, the bridge is connected with ethernet and bridge to my 2,4 GHz WiFi. Anyone know what the issue might be?

Is it easy to set the Hue to amber with no blue light, at night for circadian rhythm purposes?

I just built my own DIY Signe! I think the original looks rather cheap for such an expensive lamp, so my first thought was to build a wooden stand myself.

I cut an old roof batten into pieces about 25–33 cm long, sanded and stained them, and glued them together. For the light itself, I used a 45-degree black aluminium profile with a high-quality diffuser. I attached it to the wood using the clips that came with the LED profile. I also added a metal angle profile to reinforce the stand and provide some extra weight for better stability.

I'm really happy with the result! However, I have to admit that I already knew the base would look a bit too small in proportion to a 2-metre light profile. I thought I might shorten the light profile later, but now I'm considering making the base taller by using longer pieces of wood, which would give it better proportions.

The wood stain also turned out a bit too dark for my liking, but overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. I now have a 2-metre floor lamp for a fraction of the price of the original Hue Signe, with gradient lighting and, thanks to the Ultra Bright option, more than enough light output!

The total costs were about 110€ with 80€ being for the ultrabright strip with 3 Metres, and around 20 bucks for the led Profile and around 10 bucks for stain and metal angle

I have three pendant lights over my bar. For years these have worked fine with hue. Last year, I had one bulb start coming on without any signal.

I switched it within the light fixture. The same bulb malfunctioned so I assumed the bulb was bad. Replaced.

Now, another bulb is malfunctioning. This time, it stays off despite all my attempts to put it on. Now, if I switch it within the fixture, the malfunctioning bulb changes. Which is making me believe the fixture is the root cause.

Is that possible? I thought it’s pretty much “supply power, bulbs work”.

Also, I have tried three different switches.
A regular switch
An older dimmer switch
A newer led-compatible Lutron dimmer

All three show the behavior.

I’m stuck. Anything else to try?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been reverse-engineering the heavily locked-down Philips Hue Secure Cameras (CMW004) for months to build Project HomeSafe — a 100% local security system inside Home Assistant (live video, recordings, sirens, and geofencing) completely bypassing the official cloud and app.

All 4 of my Hue Secure cameras are now streaming raw H.264 video simultaneously with 0% CPU overhead, pushing flawlessly into local RTSP feeds in full PLAYING state!

Next up is finishing the HA dashboard integration, local MP4 recording triggers, and syncing HA presence tokens to arm/disarm the built-in sirens automatically.

Want the technical breakdown, the GStreamer pipeline configs, or the code for the key derivation?

Drop a comment or an upvote below, and I’ll share the architecture and snippets!

Been considering getting one for a couple months. It turned out how I thought and am pretty pleased with it. The sunbeam and opal effects are pretty next level. I’d recommend putting the end that goes on to the ceiling with a toggle anchor if you are planning on putting one up.

I have a run of about 9 m I want to cover with a light strip. We use Spotify Sync quite a lot with the kids, but I can't seem to find anything about how these work with Spotify.

Does it use the full gradient, do they show up in a fixed number of sections or will the whole thing be one colour?

Hey,

​I'm setting up 3 Philips Hue Play bars along the top edge behind my TV to project light upwards onto the wall.

​Instead of mounting them directly onto the TV with tape, I’m thinking about installing a small shelf on the wall right behind the TV and placing the bars there.

​Does anyone have experience with this? Does a small shelf work just as well for light spread and diffusion compared to mounting them directly on the TV?

​Thanks for any tips!

I am awaiting the arrival of 6 br30 lights for our living room (pictured). I own the retrofit lights for another room. Thinking of doing the retrofits instead of the br30. These will all have the color option for holiday themes/ movies etc. (Daughter is really excited to decorate the house for Halloween so I’m not waiting til Black Friday).

Chat gpt noted the br30s will have more directional lighting due to the cans.

Just curious if anyone has regretted the br30 and decided the retrofits looked better aesthetically as well as less directional lighting?

To sum it up:

I bought 8 br30 for $290. 6 retrofits cost $324.
Is the extra cost worth it?

Family room ceiling is 9ft. This is in a more visible visited area of the house (guests etc).

Pictured:

-Living room
-Retrofit light borrowed from another room. (Painted black around the light to look better for black ceiling)

Hey everone,

Can I am quite overbudget rn and I need some spots. I was wondering if these will work with my hue ecosystem. Like the same app and stuff with my regular bulbs spots and entertaiments?

Hi everyone,

​I have a 100" TV with two Hue Signe floor lamps on each side. I currently have no lighting across the top and want to add some.

​I was thinking about using a 55" Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip for TV (which is around 2 meters long) and mounting it completely straight along the top edge of the Tv

​My question is: Will the lightstrip only sync to the top of the screen content and work? ​

But since this strip is originally designed to wrap around three sides of a TV, will that cause issues with the color mapping, or will it work completely fine?

​If this doesn't work, what you recommend?

​Thanks for the help!

Is there an alternative for the GU 5.3 bulb from Phillips Hue? I had some from Ledvance but I think they are no longer in production. So do you know some existing alternative? Thanks in advance.

Has anyone else figured out a way to configure the smart plug automation for "leaving home" to something other than "turn off"?

I'd like to plug devices in where when I leave a geofence, they turn on and when I enter geofence, they turn off.

Right now, under automations, the only available option Is to turn off.

My set up is that I have an indoor camera that I want to trigger automatically by turning off when I'm home, and turning on when I leave.

Just got the lights set up and it makes watching music festivals at home soooooo much better! Still need to get the wires tucked away but these are amazing lights

Hue doorbell camera. Does anyone know what it means when two red dots appear horizontally next to each other?

It doesn’t say anything on this in the manuel or information online.

Thanks in advance!

We use Lutron dimmers/switches controlled through Apple HomeKit for most of our house but I think I need to branch out to Hue Essentials bulbs for this fix.

We have twin toddlers who share a bedroom. In their room we have one table lamp with a plug-in Lutron dimmer box and then an overhead light with two bulbs in it. One of the twins likes to turn the lights on at night (they have a night light too) and despite setting a schedule on the Lutron dimmer switch to set max brightness to 10% they'll hit the physical on button on the dimmer switch itself and that overrides the software and goes to 100% brightness. Which will often wake up the other twin.

The only reliable fix we've found is unscrewing the bulbs in both the ceiling and the table lamp which is a bit annoying to do every night. We did it for a while - they slept fine without complaint - but within a week of leaving them screwed in again the light started popping back on.

What I'd Like to Do: I'd like to buy some Philips Hue Essential bulbs and set the maximum brightness to 5-10% and the color temp to 2200-2700k from 8:30p to 7:00a every night. That way we can leave the bulbs plugged in, turning them on won't make the room overly bright but the kids still have the option to add some light, and then they'll work at regular brightness during the day. From what I'm read this is works for the kids hitting the physical dimmer switch button - the hardware may jump to 100% power but if the bulb itself is set to lower brightness it'll stay dim.

Question: do I need a bridge for this? I don't need remote capabilities but I'd like to have the schedule be automatic each day and not something I need to manually toggle.

TL;DR: I'd like to set three Hue Essential bulbs in my kids' room to a max brightness of 5-10% on a schedule each night. Can I do this without a bridge?

Turns out that you can simply ask Claude to control your hue lights connected via Bluetooth and it'll just do it in 10-15 minutes.

Initially, I simply wanted to control them on my desktop because I find having to use the mobile app annoying. But then I thought it should be possible to implement sync as well, the latency is decent at around 30ms (the transition takes 100ms). No new reverse-engineering as far as I know, the BT protocol has already been mapped years ago.

edit: here's a sample without the 100ms interpolation and some reduced latency in the frame capture - https://streamable.com/n381z2

Let’s start with a quick look at the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 4K. The new model is receiving a firmware update to version 3.5.2, which is intended to improve stability during long-term operation. There are also improvements to network security. Overall, nothing too spectacular.

The situation is quite different for the newer generations of Hue lights. Specifically, this applies to the 100b-129 hardware platform. This includes all new products released this year, as well as the E27 bulbs and GU10 spotlights from fall 2025—in other words, all devices with a built-in Matter over Thread chip. In the update description for software version 1.164.2, Philips Hue lists the following points: * Bug fixes and stability improvements * Added support for Matter 1.4.1 * Added support for Matter Apple adaptive lighting * Added support for Zigbee and Matter concurrency in bridgeless mode

Source: https://hueblog.com/2026/10/08/firmware-updates-for-hue-lights-and-the-new-sync-box/