hueiot: Follow the sun and activities to control Philips Hue lights.

Background

I am certainly thrilled with IoT, but I prefer to keep as much as I can within the 'firewall'. This suite of bash scripts managed were built under Ubuntu/Raspbian on a low power Raspberry Pi for 24-7/365 management of the Philips Hue lights in the home.

Usage

Configure

Modify hue.sched for your lighting preferences

Lighting Devices

• lightnames: these are logical and can essentially be anything desired.
• lightclass: describes type of light in lightnames, currently either hue or 433mhz.
• lightHueID: ID used for the hue light in the API to the Hue Bridge.
• light433mhzON and light433mhzOFF: 433mhz code for switching 433mhz ON/OFF

Lighting Schedules

• sched: Starting at 0, the ordinal light number of configured lightnames (0 is the first, 1 is the second, and so on). Every logical light in lightnames can have more than one schedule entry in sched.
• lightsON: The date time (in Linux epoch) when the light is to come on.
• lightsOFF: The date time (in Linux epoch) when the light is to go out.
• bynite: TRUE means the scheduled event should follow Sun up/down, otherwise set to FALSE.
• bytv: TRUE means the scheduled event should follow state of another IOT device in the household, like a TV/Home Theater. Otherwise set to FALSE.
• byvacation: TRUE means the scheduled event should follow state of being away (such as on vacation) for a longer period of time. Otherwise set to FALSE.

Lighting Configuration Rules:

• lightstate: should be initialized to OFF.
• lightnames, bynite, bytv, byvacation and lightstate must have the same number of elements equal to the number of lights you want to control.
• sched, lightsON, and lightsOFF must have the same number of elements equal to the number of scheduled lightsON events (and lightsOFF) you prefer.

Determining the Linux epoch for lightsON and lightsOFF

• TBD

Local Settings

Modify autoHue.sh for local settings

• LOC
• IOTDIR
• VACA

Modify iotalive.sh for your devices (if only a TV)

• _deviceID
• _deviceDNS

Install to Run at Boot

Copy/move hue.sched to ${IOTDIR} Add iotalive.sh and autoHue.sh to /etc/rc.local

TBD

References/Dependencies

Motivated and inspired by Risacher's Sunwait program which provides celestial times for solar movement by GPS location. The version used pre-dates Risacher's current version of Sunwait now on GitHub (see Task List below).

Project Hardware

Raspberry PI

433Mhz Controller

Hue Bridge

433Mhz LED Strip

Etekcity 433Mhz Outlets

Task List

• Debian/Ubuntu
• Place localizations, API keys in a configuration/parameters file
• Revise to work with Risacher's Sunwait (new version of sunwait from 2004)
• Move startup from /etc/rc.local to systemd
• Create a GUI to generate a schedule
• Port to work with BSD date
• Port to php (takes care of BSD date)

circa 202208