A quick and dirty hack to get circadian lighting with Philips Hue
Previous attempts to use off-the-shelf software proved to have issues with scene detection resulting in lights desyncing from the circadian schedule spontaneously. As I don't use scenes at home, I wrote a dirty hack to forcefully set the colour temperature and Luminosity values regardless of if there is a scene or not to avoid any issues with the lights de-syncing.
Note: I made this OSS in case it will be helpful to someone. Feature requests and bug reports will be rejected/closed unless you submit a PR to add/fix it yourself.
First we build and install it to the system (make sure you have cmake and a C++14 capable compiler installed):
$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/EmilyBjoerk/photon-hue.git
$ mkdir photon-hue/build
$ cd photon-hue/build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo adduser --system --group --shell /bin/nologin --no-create-home photon-hue
If you want to uninstall, just replace install in the last line with uninstall and remove the photon-hue group and user using the normal tools. Keep the source and build files around if you used a different install prefix.
Then we need to configure it with an API key (username) from the hub and optionally specifiy the MAC address of the bridge if there are several bridges. Do this by running the application once, and note the MAC and user name outputted:
$ photon-hue
Now fill in the user name from the above (and optionally the MAC):
$ sudo -e /usr/local/bin/photon-hue-service
Finally, make photon-hue start automatically on boot, start it now, and verify its status:
$ sudo systemctl enable photon-hue
$ sudo systemctl start photon-hue
$ sudo systemctl status photon-hue
To view the logs you can use journaltcl:
$ sudo journalctl -fu photon-hue.service
The service will read the API key and MAC address of the bridge from the environment (because I lazy). photon-hue-service is a launcher script that sets the environment variables for you. If you launch the photon-hue binary without having set any of the environment variables it will connect to the first bridge that it can find and then request a new API key from it and print it to the standard output. The MAC address can be specified if you want to connect to a specific bridge, but is not needed if you only have one bridge on your LAN.
Launching photon-hue with the parameters set on the command line:
HUE_MAC=00:00:00:00:00 HUE_APIKEY=0123456789ABCDEFGH photon-hue
See the schedule global in main.cpp. I'm too lazy to add config parsing, just edit the source and rebuild and re-install.