I don't the 30/40 € bridge is the problem considering the lights are pretty expensive
On the plus side:
- Hue basically works. Hue and Eve are pretty much the only IoT brands that are bulletproof. They just work, no matter what, no excuses.
On the minus side:
- the Hue app is hot garbage and tries REALLY hard on every possible occasion to fsck over and play badly with your HomeKit installation. Words cannot describe how much I hate everything about this app.
So where does this leave you?
If you can afford it, honestly, buy Hue and buy Eve. Yes, you can buy cheaper bulbs but after three months you will hate them. The Wyze bulbs are constantly flakey, on any given interaction with them there's about a 10% chance they won't respond. The Ikea bulbs are quite a bit more reliable, but insist on mapping their color temperature onto HomeKit in a way that makes very little sense.
Likewise the Hue smart plug (like the Eve smart plug) is bulletproof. Wemo, Wyze plugs -- utter garbage, will randomly lose connectivity once or twice a month.
The Hue motion detector is not exactly worth the cost if all you want is a motion detector (that's failry simple tech that even the most incompetent companies mostly can't screw up) BUT it's the one reliable sensor that comes with an adequate (not great, let's not get carried away) light sensor. You can use this to control lights coming on automatically in a way that works better than just time (or even sunset) based scheduling because it handles cloudy days well. (But Home.app makes doing this vastly more painful than it should be...)
The Hue smart button box is actually REALLY nice! Comes with 4 buttons, and is magnetic (so it sticks magically to my nightstand, which has iron in it). "Normal" configuration requires you to use the Hue app, and it only controls lights. You'd have to be insane to use that app. BUT you can use HomeBridge to bridge it into HomeKit as a generic 4-button controller and for that purpose it is awesome.
So yeah, it sucks that every idiot company on earth wants you to buy their own Zigbee hub, and has sucky non-generic apps. Look past that and Hue gives you reliability, and adequate HomeKit connectivity (easily augmented via HomeBridge for the button remote); and you can then do everything necessary in HomeKit (which is hardly great, but better than anything else).
As for this PARTICULAR issue: so you want cool lights behind your TV. Here are the options:
- buy a Phillips Ambilight TV. Not great if you like your current TV, or don't like any other aspect of the Phillips TV.
I don't understand why this feature hasn't already been copied by every other TV manufacturer, but right now the simplest solution.
- buy a Hue sync play box (~$300) and the Phillips LEDS (~$200). Probably the best quality, but expensive!
- if you just want to try the idea, see if you like it, a better choice is the govee LED strips kit (~$80)
Govee LED TV Backlights
www.amazon.com
These use a fish-eye camera attached to the top of the TV to get an idea of the TV image, to choose the colors for the LEDs. Does it work? Yes -- but...
The SW is not great (either the app software to set things up, or the firmware that translates the camera image into LED colors) and there is a (slight, but sometimes noticeable) delay so with fast action the LEDs lag the screen image.
If you use either of these solutions you will have to attach the LEDs to the back of the TV yourself. Conceptually it's not hard, but it may be difficult depending on how your TV is mounted, how heavy and large it is, etc -- think that through.
Personally I am happy with my Govee solution. It was cheap enough that was worth trying for fun, and my conclusion is I like the LED background color, and I like how it tracks the screen image -- but not enough to spend $500 and go through the hassle of pulling off my current LEDs and attaching new ones.
My ideal solution would be
- every TV company just builds colored LEDs in the back of the TV
- use them as a static color backdrop
- just pay the damn TV company an extra $100 so they can activate the sync with the screen image and pay Phillips whatever royalty they demand for whatever tenuous patent they have on the feature.
Let's see if we've moved to that by the time I need to buy a new TV.