Want to create the right atmosphere to match your mood?
The Philips Hue is the most intelligent lighting system on the market. The Hue system is comprised of a bridge which communicates over the Internet and smart lights. There's lots of different types of lights to connect to the Hue Bridge - from bulbs to LED strips.
With Hue, you can set light colors to transform the mood of a room, create lighting profiles for different scenarios, create light profiles to wake up to, and even control lights outside of your home.
In this guide, you'll be building a touchscreen lighting controller with an Adafruit PyPortal to control a light, or groups of lights, connected to a Philips Hue bridge.
The Philips Hue lighting system revolves around the Hue Bridge. This bridge is connected to your router and communicates wirelessly over radio (in a format called ZigBee) to Hue lights and devices linked to the bridge.
Instead of including a separate WiFi radio in each bulb, which increases the number of WiFi devices on your router, only the hub is connected to your router.
If you're looking for a way to interactively control Philips Hue Lights with CircuitPython, follow along!
CircuitPython Code
CircuitPython is perfect for building Internet-of-Things projects. This project uses the ESP32SPI CircuitPython library, which can use the ESP32 as a WiFi-coprocessor to send web requests to the LIFX HTTP Remote Control API.
We've also built a Philips Hue helper module for CircuitPython to make interfacing with Hue incredibly easy.
You can rapidly update your code without having to compile and store WiFi and API secret keys on the device. This means that there's no editing code and re-uploading whenever you move the PyPortal to another network - just update a file and you're set.
PyPortal
Say hello to PyPortal! The easiest way to build your IoT projects with a touchscreen display!
Prerequisite Guides
If you're new to CircuitPython, take a moment to walk through the following guides to get you started and up-to-speed:
You can get both of these and a PyPortal stand in AdaBox 011:
