re: Phillips Hue Lights

quote:

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limited only by your imagination
- lamp that is always yellow if any of your doors are unlocked
- turn blue when it starts to rain
- mine all turn red when the smoke alarm goes off
- turn them LSU colors whenever a game is starting on TV
- use fun free apps like hue switcher and huegasm to have them color cycle or change color with the music playing
- i had a cool routine setup that turned the kitchen island yellow 15 minutes before the bus arrived then red 5 minutes before so the kids knew to quit slacking
- flash when an alexa timer ends (so if you're out of earshot of the dot with the timer you know it just ended)
- i have scheduled 'scenes' daily that change the brightness and color for my bloom, lightstrips and hue bulbs as the day wears on

some of this was done using a smart hub 'script' and some is IFTTT and some is using stringify.

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Another cool thing I do is to have the bathroom lights come on as nightlights if the motion sensor triggers them after ten. No fumbling for a light switch or getting your eyes blasted by bright lights that fully wake me up if I need to pee in the middle of the night.

When I trigger the front gates to open for a guest, the porch, foyer, and living room lights come on.

I have a command where it will turn the lights on using the Philips Hue lab formula so that they're proper for the time of day. The color temperature continuously and automatically becomes redder and redder the darker it is outside and bluer and bluer as it becomes brighter and brighter.

When the TV is turned on, Harmony commands the lights in the living area to automatically configure themselves for watching and when the TV is turned off, they come back on to a medium brightness soft white setting.

When it's bedtime, telling Alexa that it's bedtime turns all of the interior lights off and makes sure that all of the exterior lights are on.

At sunset, all of the exterior lights come on anyway.

Like CAD said, between the Hue ecosystem, its hooks into Alexa, and third party applications that can set hooks into Hue like IFTTT and Stringify, if you can think of something you'd like to do and have a little tech savvy, you can probably make it happen. I have a 3D printing rig and a setup that turns the lights in the room the rig is in a soft white when there's an active print, turns the room red if the printer has thrown an error, and turns the room green if a print completes. The door to that room stays closed to keep animals/non-nerds from messing with my printer while it's going. When I'm just moving around the house, I can tell at a glance by looking at the light shining under the door how things are going in there.