When Philips announced the cheaper non color changing bulbs coming soon, along with a physical switch, I decided they were worth looking into. I picked up the starter kit with 3 bulbs and the control pod, along with one of the bloom lights.

Setup was pretty easy, including tying it to their cloud service. This allows control from outside the home, and is key for geofencing to work when outside WiFi range. The magical/creepy side of setup mirrors Nest, where their servers seem to be watching for new devices, and notice a web signup request from the same IP. The site knew initially that my bridge wasn't powered on, then knew it was up and running without refreshing the signup page. To confirm the bridge is correct, the page then asks for the button on the bridge to be pressed.

Out of the box, the app provides timer based schedules, along with geofencing capabilities. I haven't made use of the timer ones much yet, but the slow fade in capabilities may be useful as an alarm clock. Geofencing has been working very reliably, and it's been pretty cool seeing my apartment light up as I walk back toward it at night without doing anything manually. The app is also central to setting the desired color of each bulb. Conveniently the picker offers both the standard full range of colors, along with a separate band up top that corresponds to typical lighting color temperatures.

Last weekend I spent some time getting my NAS ready to control the lights (compiling support libraries on an ARM processor takes a little bit of time). The bridge they provide runs a web service with a RESTful interface. One of my first goals is to use one of the lights for notifications of the backup status of this board and my e-mail server. So far I can turn on and off the lights, make them blink, but having issues changing colors accurately. Found out the bulbs don't have pure RGB LEDs in them, but ones that are slightly off. The bulbs expect all color values to be sent as a 0-1 range for the intensity of the 3 different base colors, and the library I picked has some bug in it's attempt to map them to a 0-255 RGB range. Conveniently for debugging though, the phone app will update the color picker screen every few seconds from adjustments made elsewhere. (Bulb 4 in the screenshot should be in the green area, but the bug is throwing it into yellow).

I think beyond notifications, I may try and get Flux like adjustments to the lighting working at night.

Anyone else here have some of the Hue lights? Curious about your experiences after having them for a while.