New Hue A60 bulbs support a wider color temperature / brightness range

[MR-kartoshki]

Hi! The new generation of Philips Hue A60 White and Color Ambiance bulbs seems to support a much wider range than what HueBLE currently allows.

The new 1100 lm A60 is advertised as supporting 1000K–20000K white temperatures and dimming down to 0.2%.

HueBLE currently limits color temperature to 153–500 mired (~2000K–6500K), so the new bulbs should theoretically be able to go quite a bit beyond that. 1000K–20000K would be roughly 1000–50 mired.

Brightness might also be worth looking into. HueBLE currently uses the 1–254 brightness range, while 1/254 is ~0.39%, which doesn’t seem to line up with the 0.2% minimum brightness advertised for the new bulbs. I’m not sure if Philips added a new BLE characteristic for finer brightness control or if there’s something else going on there.

I don’t have the bulb yet so I haven’t been able to test what it actually accepts over BLE, but I thought I’d open this since the current limits seem to be based on the older generation of Hue bulbs.

Maybe the limits could eventually be detected per bulb, or updated somehow for the newer models while keeping compatibility with older ones.

@flip-dots

[flip-dots]

Sure, its possible, if it works anything like how effects work then there will be a separate GATT characteristic for this more precise control, though I don’t have any of those bulbs to test.

I would be happy to accept a PR which implements this, #5 implemented effects support which would be worth looking at for anyone wishing to add support for this.

Its probably worth mentioning though that the primary purpose of this library is to allow Home Assistant to control Hue lights over BLE and while HA could handle a wider colour temperature range, the brightness of light entities is in the 1-255 range, so more precise light control is not possible in HA yet.

[MR-kartoshki]

Thanks, that makes sense.

I’m getting one of the new A60 bulbs soon, so I should be able to test this on actual hardware. I’ll have a look at how #5 implemented the effects characteristics and compare the GATT layout of the new bulb against what HueBLE currently knows.

For the colour temperature range, I can probably test the actual min/max values pretty easily. For the more precise brightness control, I’ll check whether the bulb exposes an additional characteristic and what the official app appears to use.

I’m not personally using Home Assistant, so the 1–255 HA brightness limitation isn’t a problem for my own use case, but I’d obviously keep compatibility in mind if I end up making a PR.

I’ll update this issue once I have the bulb and some actual results.