My web tool for controlling (the color temperature of) Philips Hue lights

▼ Last year I got a new webcam, which led me to ask myself what color temperature setting for my Hue lightbulbs would work best with that camera. (Turns out: 4000K.)

But: how do you set your Hue lights to a certain color temperature? I didn't find a good solution for that. So I built my own! And then feature creep kicked in and I ended up with a browser-based tool that can control the lights in various ways. Including having the bulbs change their brightness / color temperature gradually over the course of seconds or minutes or even an hour.

So it got a bit more complex than ideal, and you need to jump through a few hoops to get the name or IP address of the Hue bridge and an authentication key. But I promise it's really nice. It has sliders for easy operation on an iPad and the like, but you can also use the keyboard.

Check it out.

Note that the whole thing runs inside the browser and directly talks to the Hue bridge over the local network. So no information is sent to the server. The authentication key can be stored in the browser's password store where it should be safe from prying eyes. But be careful with what you enter in the bridge IP address field because the authentication key is sent to the system with that address or name.

The huge bridge used to create the name "philips-hue.local" for itself, but now they they create a .local name from their MAC address. For instance:

ndp -a 00178827894e.local 0:17:88:27:89:4e en0 23h59m47s S

Permalink - posted 2022-07-12