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 CodeCircuitPython 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.
PyPortalSay 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: