Spooky Lights

Spooky Lights is a quick script to add a spooky, haunted house vibe to your Philips Hue home lighting. Currently it supports two effects, flicker and breathe.

It is mostly auto discovering and quite easy to configure. The base setup of the lights is done through the Hue app (or your existing home automation system) and Spooky Lights just reads the existing state of each light. If lights are turned off, they will be ignored.

Installation

Installing can be done via NPM:

npm install -g @cartman640/spooky-lights

Spooky Lights should then be avaiable on your command line with the command spooky-lights.

Configuration

1. Authentication

Spooky Lights needs to be able to talk to your Hue Bridge. It expects a .env file in the directory that you are running it from containing a HUE_USER variable.

To register a new user on your Hue Bridge, just select the register-user option:

? Choose command
  run
  list-lights
> register-user

Spooky Lights will prompt you to press the link button on the top of your Hue Bridge, then press Enter to proceed.

? Press the link button on your Hue bridge (Y/n)

Once registered, you will be given a username to put into the .env file.

2. Setting up rules

Spooky Lights reads its rules from a rules.json file that lives in the current working directory. The basic format of this is an array of objects:

[
    {
        "name": "Kitchen",
        "command": "flicker",
        "frequency": 20
    },
    { ... }
]

Where name is the name of the light from the Hue app, command is either "flicker" or "breathe" and frequency is a number between 0 and 100.

Frequency is the chance that this light will be included in the "effect lottery". If all lights are the same (e.g. 20) then there is a 20% chance that an effect will be run, and a 1/n where n is the number of lights that this particular light will be used.

The rules are evaluated every second.

You can list the available lights for convenience from Spooky Lights, just select the list-lights option:

? Choose command
  run
> list-lights
  register-user

You will get a list of available lights, non RGB lights will only be able to use the flicker effect (as shown in the output).

Running

Once your .env and rules.json files have been setup, you can start Spooky Lights by selecting the run option:

? Choose command (Use arrow keys)
> run
  list-lights
  register-user

If everything has been configured correctly you should see a conneciton successful message:

? Choose command run
Found bridge: 10.16.2.7
Checking connection...
Connection successful

And your lights will begin to flicker.

Caveats

This relies on your network being configured in such a way that the Hue auto discovery works for finding the bridge, and it will always use the first bridge it finds.

Testing has only been completed on the regular Hue White lights, the Extended Color RGB lights and the light strips.