FabianWhen Philips Hue started more than ten years ago, it was far from clear how much fun the smart light would become. After all, back then it only started with a simple starter set with three E27 light bulbs, otherwise there was nothing at all. In the meantime, you can easily equip the whole house – and that certainly causes problems.
In this context, Horst asked an exciting question: I would like to set up a room with password access in my Hue app, so that not every user from our household can switch the lamps on and off. How can this be done?
These are possible solutions
The bad news: it doesn't work. However, there are workarounds and also an exciting little glimpse into the future.
Idea 1: If the children are not to control the whole house, but only their own room, then one could fall back on the Bluetooth function. In this way, only selected lamps could be coupled with the app.
Idea 2: For the pure control of devices, iConnectHue may not be the best solution. However, individual rooms can be “hidden” there so that they are completely invisible.
The problem: Full system access for every user
One of the big problems with Philips Hue, in my opinion, is the fact that any person who can press the button on the bridge gets full system access and can not only control all the lights but also change important settings or even delete rooms or bulbs.
According to my information, at least this is a construction site that Philips Hue will take care of. When exactly this will be the case and what this solution will look like in concrete terms, I unfortunately cannot say at the moment.
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In my case I overcome this limitation with physical controls to only that room. Following your example, kids only have access to hue switches or wall switches with pre-defined settings, but not app.
Not ideal, but works for me.
I suspect we’ll see a lot of innovation with Matter.
For exemple very granular access control could be achieved by having the bridge on an isolated VLAN (or a separate network) and a software that speaks Matter on both networks (Hue VLAN and general PC+phones VLAN), but acts as an access control gateway. It could allow or deny access to individual rooms, zones or bulbs by simply handling a control access list for each resource before forwarding the command to the other network and the target device.
Such a piece of software would not have to handle everything, just to understand Matter endpoints and control access to them.