Smart home (Philips Hue)

Setup → Smart home holds three kinds of hub: a Philips Hue bridge, a Home Assistant instance, and an MQTT broker. This page is about the first.

Pairing a bridge

1. Setup → Smart home → Add a hub → Philips Hue.
2. Easymatic looks for bridges on your Wi-Fi. If none appears, type the bridge’s address — discovery uses mDNS, which AP isolation, guest VLANs and many mesh routers block, and those are exactly the networks hardest to debug.
3. Press the round link button on top of the bridge and tap Connect. You have a few seconds; “the button wasn’t pressed in time” just means try again.
4. Name the bridge. That name is what your macros will show.

A bridge issues its key exactly once, so a successful pairing is stored before the naming step. Walking away from the form never throws it away.

The certificate prompt

A Hue bridge presents a certificate signed by a root no Android device trusts, at a bare LAN address that moves with your DHCP lease. Easymatic therefore pins the exact certificate it saw during pairing, and cross-checks the bridge id it reads back against the one mDNS advertised.

When the bridge’s firmware rotates its certificate, the hub detail screen offers Trust new certificate, showing both fingerprints. The wording there is the whole advice:

Only trust it if you reset or replaced your bridge. If you did not, something else on your network is answering as it.

The three light nodes

Node	What it does
Control light	On, off, toggle, brightness, colour, colour temperature
Recall scene	Recall, or switch off / toggle the room behind a scene
Read light state	Whether it is on, its brightness, its colour

The nodes say light, not Hue: Home Assistant’s lights, areas and scenes drive the same three nodes.

A light target is one field, not two. Choosing “Kitchen ceiling” already determines which bridge it is on, so there is no separate hub field — the name is cached inside the chosen value, which is what lets the config form still read “Kitchen ceiling” with the bridge unplugged.

Two behaviours worth knowing

Setting a value also switches the light on, by default. That is right for “dim the lamp to 30 %” and wrong for “warm the living room down for the evening”, which should not light four lamps nobody had switched on — so the value-setting operations offer Only lights already on.

That option cannot be one request to the bridge, so Easymatic reads the states, then writes one light at a time, paced. It is also the only path that can report nothing changed with no error: the hub was reached and had nothing lit to change. That is logged as information, not as a warning — a macro that dims the living room every evening should not file a warning on the evenings it is already dark.

A scene has no “off” of its own. A scene is a saved arrangement, so recalling it is a real operation and un-recalling it is not. Switch off and half of toggle therefore act on the room or zone behind the scene, found from the scene rather than asked for. So off is wider than on: recalling lights the lamps the scene names, switching off takes the whole room — including a lamp the scene never touched, which is both what a person means and the only thing a bridge can be asked for.

Toggle costs an extra read, which makes it the one scene operation that can race a wall switch.

Refreshing

The hub detail screen lists lights, rooms, zones and scenes, with a Refresh. That snapshot is what the pickers offer, and it is refreshed after pairing, when the screen opens, on an explicit Refresh, and when a picker opens — never on an execution path. A node writes to the id it was handed, with no lookups.

Commands to one bridge are serialised and paced, because a Hue bridge silently drops beyond roughly ten light commands a second. Without that, a loop over twenty lights would light twelve and report success for all twenty.

Why there is no “light changed” trigger

A Hue bridge has no push channel Easymatic uses, so every read is a round trip — slow and failable, which is what a pulled value may not be. That is also why Read light state is an action rather than a value node.

Home Assistant does push, which is why it has triggers and a value node. See Home Assistant.