Phillips Hue: How to restore previous state of bulb when using electric switch?

Question

I have a number of Philips Hue bulbs at home, but they are only used pretty much like classic on/off-no-color light bulbs today, mainly because I do find electric switches more useful than pulling out my iPhone or correct HueTap just to turn the light on/off. - Every time the Hue bulb is switch off, it forgets its state and always comes back on at 100% brightness in white color.

After lots of googling (and not finding any solutions) I wonder whether I am missing the point and why others do not have this problem.

I am certainly not keen on doing software or even hardware work here, but if I had a reasonable idea I'd love to evaluate such path:

• is there anything planned from Philips to fix this? The last firmware update did not help and Philips product support explained that this is not a bug, it is just the way it is designed.
• any new "stateful" bulbs?
• any work-arounds like patched / custom bulb or bridge firmware?
• any recommendation on how to tackle this problem?
• Assuming the Hue bulbs themselves do not have any memory installed, I guess they always switch on at 100% brightness and then register with the bridge? And this would be the earliest possible moment to restore the previous state?
• Can this problem be solved using Hue SDK? (how long does it take for a turned on bulb to be controllable by the Hue Bridge? What is the quickest way for a Java program to get notified of a bulb being electrically turned on?)
• any chance to get the previous state restored in a quicker way if using some ZigBee protocol/techniques directly?

Any hints are much appreciated.

Best regards, Christian

Answer 1

I agree that it might be irritating that the last state of a light bulb is not being preserved. There is a thread on the developer site of Hue, which gives some insight:

• Apparently, there are internal discussions on this topic. The team at Philips hesitates to implement a restore of the previous state due to "security reasons": A user could be left in the dark, if she uses the electrical switch, but the previous state was "off". This opinion has been reiterated in a tweet. There is no definite conclusion in the thread yet.
• You can do a workaround and continuously record the state of each bulb, and restore, if necessary. There is a Node.JS script on GitHub that seems to be doing exactly this. If you want to run this as a stand-alone solution, buy a Raspberry Pi (or something similar).

One problem with an SDK based solution is the latency: In my setup, it takes between 3-9 seconds to recognize a light bulb as being switched on and about 20-30 seconds to recognize a light bulb being switched off.

Here is my Python code for monitoring the reachability of my light bulbs, using python-hue-client:

from hueclient.api import hue_api
from hueclient.models.light import Light
from datetime import datetime
from subprocess import call


if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_ids = (1, 4, 5) # IDs of my light bulbs

    def handle(resource, field, previous, current):
        print "{} {}: changed reachability from {} to {}".format(datetime.now().isoformat(), resource.name, previous, current)

    hue_api.authenticate_interactive(app_name='test-app')

    # register my light bulbs
    for id in my_ids:
        light = Light.objects.get(id=id)
        print "{}: reachability is {}".format(light.name, light.state.reachable)
        # Monitor only the reachability of the light
        light.monitor(field=lambda l: l.state.reachable, callback=handle, poll_interval=0.1)

    print("Starting monitoring. Control-c to exit.")

    # Start the monitoring loop
    hue_api.start_monitor_loop()