By Philips Hue you can control lamps in your home. The lamps are commanded to change color, dim or whatever via JSON PUT. And that’s a cool feature, because you can use JSON with tons of languages such as JavaScript, Jquery, PHP, Lua, Ruby … and of course Python. Here is a very simple Python Tkinter GUI.

Online you can find tons of Apps. But it is much more cool to write your own code.

First you have to register a user or get an API key from the box. Register as a developer at meethue. Follow the steps in order to get a whitelisted user, or simply get an API key. Then you are ready to go.

Python Libraries

First you have to prepare Python and import libraries:

from Tkinter import *
import requests
import json

1. Tkinter is a library for GUI making.
2. Requests is used for POST, GET and PUT with JSON.
3. Json is Json.

The GUI class

Here is a autorunning class called Lamper (i.e. lamps in Danish). First a frame is defined. You can compare the frame with a canvas. It’s where stuff happens. Then we add a label and two buttons. Here you only see the first button:

class Lamper:

    def __init__(self,master):

        frame = Frame(master)
        frame.pack()

        ''' label '''
        self.label = Label(frame,text="Hue: all lights on / off panel")
        self.label.pack()
        
        ''' turn off light '''
        self.button = Button(frame,
            text="Off",
            fg="red",
            command=self.off)

        self.button.pack(side=RIGHT)

The Tkinterbutton has a command. It’s the command=self.off. This line will invoke a function if you click the button. The function looks like this:

    def off(self):
            self.taend = json.dumps({"on":False})
            self.r = requests.put("http://192.168.0.xxx/api/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/groups/0/action", data=self.taend)

The second button is constructed in more or less the same way. However the line where you turn off the lamps must be changed: self.taend = json.dumps({“on”:True}).

Save your work

• Save your file e.g. as myHueOnOff.py
• Now try out your program, in a terminal window write:

python myHueOnOff.py

If you’re lucky you’ll see a window with two buttons. Try to press the off button. If they dim down to darkness … well then this is a very cool starting point to a new adventure in home automation.

Perspectives

Json is a cool data exchange format. You can get all kinds of data via Json. For instance you can get the temperature from the open weathermap API.

Then you could make a lamp that turns blue in the morning if it’s freezing outside. If you’re on a unix-like system, such as Linux or Mac, the program could fire off via CRONTAB every morning when you rise.

Get the code from Github

Here is the code from Github.