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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

Can you? A relative was cleaning out some of their stuff and gave me some Philips Hue lightbulbs, but no hub. I have a Home Assistant setup with a number of Zigbee devices, but I had never found anyway to pair them direction via Zigbee, everything I saw required the hub. If there is a way, I'd like to hear it, I've just been using them as regular lightbulbs...

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Of course you can. Use Zigbee2MQTT and buy one of the supported adapters (don’t get IKEA) and all your Zigbee devices will work. No cloud needed: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/

Not reliably. There are people whose setup more or less works and they’re super loud about how everyone is wrong about the bugs, but a quick google will show you a giant army of people who have issues with it.

I may not know enough about the situation but I bought a set of bulbs a few months ago and they pretty much instantly connected to my Zigbee router connected to Home Assistant. Haven’t had any problems with them since (dimming & changing color temp).

I have been running Hue lights over zigbee and zigbee2mqtt/homeassistant for years. Get the right usb dongle and it just works.

See what I mean?

Power off the bulb. Turn your zigbee hub into pairing mode (it may always be in pairing mode). Turn on bulb. Should autopair in 30 secs or less.

My hue bulbs pair so aggressively to my zigbee hub that I have to block pairing on it to get new ones on the hue hub!

They may already be paired and you just never realized.

I have no experience from Hue lights, but at least Ikea bulbs need to go to pairing mode if they were previously paired to something. Without it they cannot pair to new hub. With Ikea lights you get them into pairing mode by flicking the lights on and off 10 times.

I've had to force my Hue bulb into zigbee pairing mode by holding a Hue dimmer switch very close, then pressing and holding the on and off buttons until the light starts to flash and stops flashing, then releasing the on/off buttons.

Side comment, I have some ZWave bulbs and they pair the same way.

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