Granularity of Philips HUE support

Read the support page describing how to set up triggers/actions to work with Philips HUE, but it’s unclear that the following sequence can be set:

When Skybell HD button is pressed --> Turn on Philips HUE bulbs --> Wait 10 seconds --> Turn off Philips HUE bulbs

I don’t want my bulbs on ALL the time – and I want them to “reset” after a certain amount of time. In this case, reset meaning turn back off. I tried using IFTTT, but it will only turn the bulbs on – so the trigger is really a one-time thing only, because upon the second Skybell HD button press you can’t turn on lights that are already on…

Anyone here know if I buy a SmartThings Hub, whether it will support the sequence I’m trying to set?

Yes, we do that with a virtual timer, but it’s generally done with a minimum increment of one minute. Not a few seconds.

You can try to do it with less than a minute using a smart app called core, but there’s no guarantee it will actually happen that quickly.

By the way, if what you really want is a visual indicator from your hue bulbs that the doorbell has been rung, you can use IFTTT and have the Hue bridge blink the lights. :sunglasses:

For the blink method, you don’t need SmartThings at all. Just use the skybell IFTTT as the “if” and the Hue IFTTT as the “that.”

Sounds like Core might just be the thing I need.

I dislike two things about the IFTTT integration: 1) it takes up to 20 seconds to start blinking, which is a non starter when the lights are my only notification that someone’s at the door, and 2) there’s not much I can control, for instance, it only blinks white and I can’t just set it to come on and then turn off after X minutes/seconds.

It’s definitely the thing to try, it’s just that there’s no guarantee it can give you sub minute response. Core will let you set up the rule, it’s just that that rule may not execute that quickly. Or it might be that quick on one day and slower on another.

SmartThings is largely a cloud-based platform, with a very small amount of local processing added on last year. And the Hue integration is still cloud-based. So they just don’t guarantee scheduled sequences of less than one minute.

That’s also disappointing to hear, no quicker than IFTTT then…

It varies from house to house, but at my house SmartThings is generally significantly quicker than IFTTT. I get a pretty consistent eight second lag for IFTTT. The same actions via the SmartThings cloud would probably be about 1.5 seconds. It’s a very noticeable difference. My Lutron, Hue, and HomeKit Devices are all faster yet, but those three are all running locally, no cloud.

In an older apartment of mine, I had a Particle Photon detecting when the doorbell rang. Response time was <1sec. It sent me a text via the Photon cloud and sent a command to my HUE lights via their local IPs to turn on.

I originally wanted to use HomeKit to turn on my lights upon a press of the Skybell HD, but Skybell is taking -forever- to integrate with HomeKit, despite their statements back in July that they would do so… hence my looking for alternatives.

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