Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

Workshopshed — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:53:13 GMT

I would go for a small wall mounted controller or perhaps a webserver and web page to be access from a phone.

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

beacon_dave — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:06:18 GMT

Hi Natasha. Nice kitchen you have there [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

Perhaps the Grid-EYE array sensor or similar might be worth a look ?

Has been reviewed:

/products/roadtest/rv/roadtest_reviews/85/panasonic_grid-eye_r

Has been kitchen tested:

/challenges-projects/design-challenges/pichef/b/blog/posts/smart-range-hood---final-project-and-one-stretch-goal---pi-chef-challenge-blog-post-12

and packaged for ease of use by Adafruit:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3538

Might help with the motion tracking to give you the smooth transitions that you are after ?

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

Fred27 — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 10:10:01 GMT

I did a bit of hacking with Philips Hue, but it was quite a few years ago. I took an entirely diffeent approach and hacked the hardware so that I could build custom lights that were controllable from the Hue ecosystem. Maybe not too relevant to your project but here's some info if you're interested:

https://0xfred.wordpress.com/category/electronics/philips-hue/

Getting back to your question, I'd definitely be tempted to go with a Pico for any new projects. It's cheap, it's available, and the development environment seems to work well. It used to be a little clunky to set up but there are some good tips here on E14 and apparently they have improved the setup if you're on Windows. In theory it would be possible to go directly to Hue via Zigbee, but that seems quite locked down. Your idea of Wifi and Hue API seems like a good pragmatic approach.

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

fmilburn — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 20:29:00 GMT

Hi Natasha,

I wrote up some experimentation I did with human detection here: /challenges-projects/project14/open-arduino/b/blog/posts/ls-cubed-little-sister-security-system

It covers PIR, ultrasonic, and radar but most of the effort was on radar. There is a lot of good discussion in the comments below the main post on the radar sensor.

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

shabaz — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 19:32:14 GMT

Hi Natasha,

It seems a very good idea to go with the Hue!

For under-cabinet lighting, I made the mistake of using LED strips from some company that appeared to sell lighting for architecture projects, but they faded and some failed over the years. (Admittedly it has now been more than a decade since they were installed, but some signs were noticeable after just a few years).

For under-cabinet lighting I'm sure you want something reliable for a decade or so, and something that is likely to continue to be supported in an ecosystem for many years.

It could also be interesting to experiment with microwave-based radar type sensors. I have tried just a single one of these on its own and I don't know if multiple ones would interfere much. These particular ones remain triggered for several seconds, so they may not be entirely ideal, if you wish to have any specific light dimming setup. They are extremely sensitive which is very good. If anything, they may be over-sensitive though, but perhaps that could still be a positive thing, since you may wish the lighting to increase even as you approach the particular workpace area (if that's what you wish to achieve). Maybe there are different models that might be less sensitive.

RE: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ??? I'm Hacking Philips Hue Lights and I need your help!

dougw — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 19:04:29 GMT

If you are more comfortable with Python, go with the Pi Pico W, if you prefer C, go with the MKR WiFi, although they can both be used with either language. Availability may also dictate which one to use. Another alternative would be an ESP32. which are also available from Newark.

Those IR sensors work well.