More light!

Charly's Column – Hue and Rasp Pi

Article from Issue 218/2019
Author(s):

Since his Trådfri Smarthome article over a year ago, sys admin columnist Charly has been receiving messages from readers with two questions: "Can you do that with the Philips' Hue system?" and "Can this also be done with a normal brightness sensor?" Yes and yes!

In a previous issue [1], I described how I control a smart light in my living room with Ikea's Trådfri system and Linux. The darker it gets, the more I turn up the lights. Around the same time, Martin Loschwitz then explained how he used a Raspberry Pi and a transmitter module to control Hue and other Zigbee devices [2].

Now I'm going to do it again, without the Zigbee module, but I expect to use a Hue bridge, which Martin's approach doesn't need, and because not everyone has a roof-top photovoltaic system, this time I focused on a simple brightness sensor.

Getting Started

First, I discovered the IP address of my Hue Bridge: 10.0.0.8. Then I pressed the button on the bridge and entered the following at the command line:

[...]

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