Unsuccessful Attempts to Connect the Philips Hue Bridge to Stream Deck

[ThermalTran]

When I try to connect to my Hue Bridge, the Stream Deck app finds the bridge and connects to it. It says "Paired" in the dialogue box, as shown in the attached image. However, when I try to select the bridge using the Stream Deck button, it's not listed in the dropdown menu. I have selected. The dropdown menu only has the options "No Bridges" and "Add New."

I've tried everything I've found on the web, but I am clearly missing something. Thanks in advance for the help!

[tiptronic]

@ThermalTran That's interesting, but it seems as if the bridge's pairing token can not be saved to your (global) preferences... Please first make sure, you can save to that location.

You are also welcome to check out our current early-access version of the plugin, which might has resolved the issue already.

If that doesn't help, please add some info about your environment (OS, StreamDeck - version, plugin-version etc...) and we'll try to find out what's going on.

[CyanideX]

This has been an issue for far too long. My bridges are discovered and added but still do not show up in the listed bridges.

No luck with the early-access version either. I once had something appear in the list with a random alphanumeric string but then it disappeared. Another time, I saw my bridge appear once but said not connected. This seems like a lost cause.

Update: After reinstalling, now it's "unable to discover bridges".

Update 2: And, for apparently no reason, I just kept clicking pair and hitting the pair button on my bridge about 100 times in a row and it magically connected. All lights found. After a year of waiting for a fix, it turns out brute force was the trick. Quality UX. 👌🏼

[ThermalTran]

Amen, man. I have worked on this for HOURS now. I have tried everything the Stream Deck has suggested. In fact, they have lost hope and don't even know what to try anymore. I hope that some patch accidentally fixes it one day because they don't know how to fix it intentionally.

[tiptronic]

@CyanideX @ThermalTran Thanks for your messages.

As always: please make sure your devices meet the minumum requirement and (if possible) just mention your operating system (and version), bridge software/hardware version and Stream Deck version.

And please me explain what's going on behind the scenes:
There are 2 potential failures possible:

1. Once the bridge is detected and you're asked to hit the link-button on the bridge, the plugin waits for 2 minutes for the bridge to report the successful press of the link-button. There are a couple of possibilities why that event is not sent/received:
   a) The link-request was not received/recognized by the bridge (unfortunately there's no way to find out, if the bridge executed the request - we can just wait)
   b) Something blocks your http communication to (or from) the external device/bridge (e.g. a firewall-rule, etc...)
   c) The link-button on the bridge's hardware doesn't work (or only works sporadically) - that's not very likely, but we had that in the past, too

2. If the event is received, it could be that the incoming token can not be saved successfully to your global (system) settings, because to successfully save those settings, you must have proper privileges and the settings accept these changes. Unfortunately we can't see, if that worked from inside a plugin, because of security restrictions. (All other settings are saved inside StreamDeck and not that sensible, and Stream Deck will take care of saving settings properly).

There might also be something else...

However, if you know the IP-address of your bridge, you can always check, if the problem is within the plugin or something in the connection.

As described in Philips Hue's own dev-portal, you can use the bridge's built-in debugger using your preferred browser, to find out more:

https://developers.meethue.com/develop/get-started-2/

... or follow these simple steps:

Just visit the developer-area of your bridge like this:

http://<yourbridgesipaddress>/debug/clip.html

(Of course change <yourbridgesipaddress> to your bridge's IP-address)

You should see the bridge's developer page.
Now just do this:

• In the URL field enter /api
• In the Message Body field, enter something like {"devicetype":"streamdeckplugin#anyname"}
• NOW press the 'link-button' on your bridge
• and within 2 minutes press the POST in the debugger-window.
• then you should see something like:

	{
		"success": {
			"username": "sQYOuZ6pCIjvIJtLyABCDEFGHMehxdEoK"
		}
	}
]

If you can't connect using the Plugin, but you see the success message above, just drop me a note here and we dig into that...

If you have more questions, just leave them in the Early-access discussion...