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Connect Philips Hue

Nexus talks to Hue lights through the Hue bridge on your local network, with no cloud account. Pairing is a one-time handshake: you press the physical button on the bridge, the bridge hands Nexus a key, and every light on that bridge joins the lighting canvas. The bridge and the PC running Nexus must be on the same network. One optional piece of Hue-app setup unlocks the fast streaming path for effects - see the last step.

1. Turn on Philips Hue

  • Open Smart Lights in the sidebar. The left column lists each supported brand as its own card; brands are off by default, so nothing is scanned or probed until you ask for it.
  • Flip the Philips Hue toggle. Turning a brand on immediately starts a scan for it, so in most cases you never have to press anything else.
  • A How to connect link appears under the brand name, pointing back at this page.

2. Find your bridge

  • The scan looks for bridges two ways at once: Philips' own bridge-discovery service, and an mDNS query on your local network. Either one is enough, and a bridge found by both is only listed once.
  • Each result shows the bridge's name and its IP address. Press Scan (the circular arrow on the brand card) any time to run it again.
  • If nothing shows up, use Add by IP at the bottom of the column: pick Philips Hue, type the bridge's IP address, and press Add. This is the fallback when multicast discovery is blocked on your network.
  • Press Pair next to your bridge. The first attempt is expected to fail: the bridge refuses to hand out a key until it sees a physical button press.
  • Nexus shows "Press the button on top of the Hue bridge, then try again" with a Retry button next to it.
  • Press the large round button on top of the bridge, then press Retry within about 30 seconds.

4. Check what got added

  • On a successful pair, Nexus enumerates every light the bridge knows about and adds them all in one step - you do not pair bulbs individually. The card reports how many were added.
  • The right-hand column groups them under Philips Hue. Each card shows the light's name from the bridge, whether it is currently online, and a toggle.
  • That toggle controls whether the light takes part in lighting effects. Turning it off leaves the light paired and listed, it just stops being driven.

5. Set colors and effects

  • Pairing only registers the lights. Color, brightness, and effects all live on the Lighting page, where Hue bulbs sit on the canvas like any other lighting device. Hue bulbs are single-color, so the canvas region a bulb covers is averaged down to one color.
  • Nexus drives Hue two ways and picks between them on its own. Where it can, it opens a Hue Entertainment streaming session to the bridge, which carries every bulb in one packet and keeps up with fast animation. Where it cannot, it falls back to the bridge's ordinary API, which works everywhere but shares a budget of roughly ten updates a second across every bulb on that bridge.
  • The streaming session only attaches to an Entertainment Area you have already created in the Hue app, and a bridge paired with an older version of Nexus needs re-pairing once so the streaming key gets captured. Miss either and you stay on the slower route: colors and fills still look right, fast effects just arrive coarser. Nexus retries the session in the background and switches over by itself as soon as it can.
  • To get the fast path, create an Entertainment Area in the Philips Hue app containing the lights you want Nexus to drive - there is no matching setting in Nexus. Philips' own Entertainment support pages walk through creating one.

Note

Nexus never removes a light behind your back, but a scan does reconcile: if a paired Hue light is no longer reachable when you scan that brand, it is dropped from the list. Its LED mapping is kept, so re-pairing restores it.