Flue is a PHP script that can set the RGB or colour temperature of your Phillips Hue lightbulbs depending on the time of day. It provides settings per bulb.
Install on a computer on your local network that will always be on. I use my Ubuntu server. You will need PHP installed.
Set up Flue by navigating to the directory and running php register.php. This will find your Hue bridge and ask you to press the blue button. Once this is done,
Flue is registered and you can start using it.
You can run Flue with php fluebot.php. I recommend setting up a cron job to run it every few minutes.
The settings live in settings.php. You can define each of the bulbs you want Flue to fiddle with in the lights array:
"1" => [ "nickname" => "Ceiling",
"mode" => "sun",
"colour_mode" => "temp",
"day" => 165,
"night" => 468,
"minutes" => 25,
"sunrise_before" => 100]The index is the bulb's ID. I've added a little script, getlights.php, which will dump a list of all of your bulbs - including their IDs - to lights.json. The individual light settings
are explained below:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| nickname | This is only used for a friendlier debugging experience. |
| mode | Which mode to manage this bulb in? Either sun or nightlight |
The settings below are for the sun mode. This will adjust your bulbs depending on the sun's position in the sky:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| colour_mode | Use temp to provide a colour temperature or rgb. |
| day | Colour when the sun is up. Provide either a colour temperature (153 to 500) or, if using rgb, an array such as ["r"=>123, "g"=> 142, "b" => 145] |
| night | Colour when the sun is down. |
| brightness | An array - ["day"=>254, "night"=>150]. If using colour temperature, you can choose the brightness. This will also be blended. |
| minutes | How many minutes the sunset will last, Flue will slowly blend the colours. |
| sunrise_before | Number of minutes to bring sunrise forward. If you wake up early, like I do, it's nice to blast yourself with daylight. |
| night_link | If this bulb should only be lit when another is in night mode (or shifting to it), reference the bulb's id in an array here: ["light"=>1]. It will be switched off during daytime hours. |
These settings are for nightlight, this will slowly dim your bulbs to off whenever you turn them in during a specific timeframe:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| start | Time in minutes (after midnight) that Flue should check for this bulb being switched on |
| end | Time in minutes (after midnight) to stop checking |
| after_midnight | true/false. Is your end time after midnight? |
| starting_brightness | How bright to initially dim the bulb? |
| duration | How long before switching off. |
| ct | Colour temperature |
While the Hue API won't tell us what the current scene is, we can react to specific bulb states. If you want Flue to leave your bulbs alone when they're in a certain state, you can use the disable_on setting:
"disable_on" => [ "film" => ["bulb" => "1",
"check" => "rgb",
"check_for" => ["r"=>98, "g"=>72, "b"=>30],
//"check_bri" => 20,
"disable" => ["1", "2", "3"] ] ]You can have any number of rules, the index is the rule name which is useful for debugging. You can find your current bulb states by using the status.php script:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| bulb | The bulb ID. |
| check | Either rgb or ct (colour temperature). |
| check_for | Either an rgb array (["r"=>255, "g"=>155, "b"=>3]) or the colour temperature. |
| check_bri | Brightness to check for if using colour temperature. |
| disable | Array of bulb IDs to skip. |
There are also some global settings:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| timezone | Your timezone. Pick from here: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php |
| long | Longitude of where you are. |
| lat | The latitude of where you are. |
| zenneth | Angle of the sun at sunset and sunrise. It's safe to leave this as it is. |
| transition | This defines how long, in multiples of 100ms, each of change should transition for. 50 is 4 seconds and is pleasant. Flue will change bulb colours in steps, each time it is run, over the course of the minutes setting but this allows you to specify how jarring those steps should be. |
If you also run a web server, you can visit index.php for an on/off switch and a "manual" mode, a "status" output and the option to override the disable_on setting.