I recently found a box in storage that contains about 10 Philips Hue bulbs; I had completely forgotten that I used them in the past. At the time, I had them paired to a Hue bridge. The newest is probably at least 6 years old, maybe a bit more.
I now have a Zigbee network with HA, and so I figure I might as well use the bulbs; they all still work. I can’t figure out how to reset them so I can pair them to my Zigbee controller, though. Every article I read assumes that they’re already connected to a bridge, to Amazon Alexa, I have a Hue dimmer controller, or something of the sort.
Is my only option to sign up for a Hue account, set up my old bridge, and reset them through the Hue app? Surely there must be some other way. I found a thread on [that other site that isn’t Lemmy] that gives a routine of switching power on/off to cause a factory reset, but it doesn’t work after several tries.
UPDATE: I was never able to find a method that worked without using my old Hue bridge. I ended up connecting the bridge and manually deleting each bulb. I few I had to add and delete again, but after about an hour of work, I was able to pair them all with HA.
I’m not buying Hue anymore, but the few ones I have reset and are ready for pairing after like four or five power cycles. Last I had to do it I remember reading about a time window that those cycles need to be in but I’m not sure how fast it needs to be.
I don’t really want to buy Hue any more either, but I might. I started switching over to Zigbee devices several weeks ago, and I’ve had a hell of a time getting motion sensors that would work. I’ve used a few PIR sensors and mmWave sensors. By far, the best performing out of all of them are the Hue motion sensors. I’m not a big fan of their decision to force Hue Bridge users onto a “it’s all in the cloud, let us collect your personal information” plan, but as far as a hardware goes, they’re orders of magnitude ahead of the other white-label stuff I’ve tried.