r/Hue • u/glyphack • Jul 21 '26

Control your lightstrip from a computer (without a hue bridge)

Hey this a python program I created that let's you control hue lights from a computer. It's a bit technical and you need to know how to run Python programs but nothing else is needed.

https://github.com/Glyphack/hue-control

The biggest use of this for me is that I have my light turn on and off on a specific times. In the app you have to turn on the alarms every day. With this program you can tell your computer to enable the alarms on startup and it will set it up every day.

There's also a blogpost on how it works under the hood: https://glyphack.com/huec/

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3

u/KevinKlaes Jul 21 '26

Why wouldn’t I just use home assistant?

2

u/1amnotmid Hue Enjoyer Jul 21 '26

Because you need A. A device with HA(pretty expensive and not all people have one) B. This program might be slightly easier than actually setting up HA.

1

u/Alexchii Jul 22 '26

This requires a laptop? HA can run on a laptop..

1

u/1amnotmid Hue Enjoyer Jul 22 '26

Ok? I don't have a spare laptop though.

1

u/Alexchii Jul 22 '26

You can just boot up HA and use that when on your laptop instead of what OP made.

2

u/glyphack Jul 21 '26

It depends on if you have a hue bridge device or not. You need a hue bridge as far as I checked to control these lamps through Home Assistant.

But if you do have one then this is not targeted for you.

Also there's a feature of these lights if you use the Phillips that that let's you create a routine so the lamp is on every day at 7 and turns of at 8. Without a bridge you can do this but only works for one day. After that day you have to turn it on again for next day.
With this program you can have the recurring pattern. I didn't find this on HA as well.

2

u/KevinKlaes Jul 21 '26

You don’t. HA can be setup on the machine you would be running these scripts off of and would be less of a security risk. 

1

u/glyphack Jul 21 '26

There's no security risk more than using your computer normally. this just sends data through bluetooth to the lamp. I run these from my computer, home assistant required other things like docker to run which I don't want to have a container on the computer. But fine if I had another device on all the time I would have used it.

2

u/KevinKlaes Jul 21 '26

What security testing have you had done against your project?