The Smart Home Project

There are a lot of posts online asking Philips to add functionality to their motion sensors so that they don't turn lights off if a certain activity is happening or the lights were turned on by another means. There are third-party apps (most of which cost money) to add some functionality to allow this, but it can be done for free if you're prepared to send some JSON configuration to the built-in debugging page.  "Wait, that sounds scary and difficult!" I hear you cry, but it is actually very simple... even if you aren't a techie. I'll take you through it step-by-step here, but all you need is a web browser and the ability to paste an edited version of the configuration into a web page and click on a button.  Scenario There are many different scenarios where this can be useful, but I'm going to give you one of my scenarios here to demonstrate the principle. I have some garden lights controlled by a motion sensor and a Hue Button, but I can also set scenes v...

Philips Hue bulbs are fantastic and hugely flexible when paired with the Hue Bridge. Out of the box the accessories support a range of features and will do most of what people want. However, if you are prepared to go a little bit deeper with them and use the built-in Hue Bridge API, you can get very sophisticated lighting automation and other information. For example, the Rules engine in the Hue Bridge allows for rules to be triggered by other rules and events and they also allow you to set any action for any button press on their accessories (e.g. successive presses of the same button on a tap switch can dim the scene or cycle through as many scenes as you want). Something that Philips doesn't shout about is that their motion sensors also have temperature and lux sensors that you can query - also very useful. So what's the problem? Well, the Philips Hue app and integrations with Amazon Alexa, Google Home Assistant, etc., assume that you have exactly 1 Hue Bridge. I guess that ...