More Lighting Control With The Hue App

I love the range, performance, and reliability of the Philips Hue smart lighting range, but I’ve long had a gripe with Philips Hue app. The entire Hue ecosystem was constrained to Scenes - a predefined set of light color and brightness that applied to all the Hue lights in a room.

Hue’s take on this is unique in that the color palette is applied to each light automatically rather than having to assign specific settings to each light. This makes it easy and can produce some nice effects, but it is often frustrating that we can’t control individual lights.

The app further limited us to only assigning a single action to a button when using Hue’s range of switches and dimmers. That meant we couldn’t use the same button to turn lights on and off and we had to waste buttons on scene controllers, like the Hue Tap, to do each thing.

Thankfully recent app updates have finally resolved this, and Hue has given us a raft of improvements that make the whole experience a lot better.

Big improvements

So, what exactly can we do now that is better than basic scene selection?

Time-based Light

Assigning a suitable scene to a room for different times of day has always been a manual task. We could set up a selection of scenes, but then have to cycle through them with multiple button presses each time. Hue now offer Time-based Light, which allows us to specifics time windows that trigger specific scenes.

This allows us to easily set up a kind of adaptive lighting where the color temperature is set to the most suitable for that time window. For example, using a cool bright light during the day for work and concentration, but opting for a warm dimmer scene in the evening for relaxing and winding down.

Now we can have the right scene selected with a single press every time without having to think about it.

More Scenes Per Action

The Hue app now allows up to 10 scenes to be used with both Scene Cycle and the new Time-based Light actions. This gives more options in both cases and allows us to make better use of a single button.

These extra time slots also apply to motion sensors, so you can have the same control through automation as with your buttons.

Turning Off Lights

This one was very exciting for me. Yeah, I know, I need to get out more.

A new feature has been added called Smart on/off. This can be enabled for any button and essentially means pressing the button when the lights are on will turn them off. What a concept! This was a huge gripe for me, and a reason to use third party platforms like HomeKit to handle my lighting controls instead of the Hue app.

Now we can have intuitive, logical on/off control with each button. This isn’t so much for the Dimmers as they have specifically marked on and off buttons, but for multi-button controls like the Hue Tap, Hue Tap Dial, and the third-party Hue Click (which I love as a light switch replacement).

Each button on a scene controller or dimmer also now has a Press and Hold action. You can assign different actions for single press and a press-and-hold, but the latter is limited to turning off the selected lights for that button, the whole home, or doing nothing. This gives an extra option for turning off the lights without having to use a separate button for the task.

Individual Light Control

Another huge win is the ability to assign a button to control specific lights instead of a whole room. This is great when you have ambient lights or lamps that you might want to control separately from the rest.

This capability isn’t obvious because it’s disabled if you have a room assigned to a button. Deselecting all rooms enables the new My Entire Home section at the top of the selection list. This comes with a drop-down arrow on the right which provides access to a list of all Hue lights on that Hue Bridge. We can now select any of those lights to be controlled by a given button. Combined with the new on/off functionality above this opens up far better control of our lights than we could do before.

Accessing the new features

All of these new features are found under the Settings > Accessories section of the Hue app.

Tapping on a controller to edit the settings you’ll see a Selected Lights section.

Use the pencil icon to edit the selection. Either select one or more rooms from the list or deselect these and use the drop down next to My entire home to select individual lights. You can of course simply select My entire home if you want, but that’s probably not likely.

For dimmers you’ll assign actions to the buttons using the action list for each below the room selection. For scene controllers you see a list of buttons at the top providing a graphical indication of which button you’re editing. You can assign lights or rooms as above for each button individually, and then assign actions to the button below that.

Button actions for a single press can be one of the folloowing:

• Time-based-light - Set up time slots to define which scene is used.

• Scene Cycle - Select up to 10 scenes to be cycled through with each consecutive press of the button.

• Single Scene - just use the one scene every time.

• Lights off - use this button as a dedicated off switch. Can be used for seperate rooms or specific lights for added flexibility.

Setting up time slots for a button press

Using the My entrie home section to select individual lights

Choosing one of the new button actions

Combining with non-Hue lights

If you haven’t gone all in on the Hue system for your smart lights (or you have other devices you want to control with your scene controllers as well), you can mix and match as before by using a compatible smart home platform to program button actions as well. Apple HomeKit is particularly good for this as it provides the ability to assign it’s own scenes, shortcuts or single device actions to any button.

As an example, I have a Hue Tap Dial in the entryway which takes the place of a multi-gang light switch. It needs to control the lights in three different rooms, one of which doesn’t use Hue lights. I could simply do all the setup in Homekit, but I would lose the functionality of the Tap Dials’ rotary dimmer as that only works on Hue lights.

To do this I set up all the Hue specific controls as normal in the Hue app, but for the button I want controlling non-Hue lights I assign the press action Single Scene, and then select the special Do Nothing scene from the options. The button still needs to be assigned to a room, but any room will do as it won’t affect it.

I can then go into the Apple Home app, open the room the Tap Dial is assigned to and edit the settings for the accessory. All four buttons have a single-press option, so I can assign a shortcut to the button I’ve chosen for the non-Hue lights that turns the lights on or off depending on their current state. You can see how to set up that shortcut in my tutorial.

Note: Only some smart home platforms offer this functionality with Hue switches, platforms like Google and Alexa don’t expose those devices, so can’t be used to create actions for them.

I’ve also used HomeKit to assign actions where I’ve wanted to control specific Hue lights, but thanks to these new Hue app features I won’t have to do that anymore, and I can take advantage of Hue’s multi-scene selection options as well.