Here is a HUEseless side-project

https://gfycat.com/samewholeamericanbadger

In this post, I will recount how I made a silly side-project playing with the Philips HUE APIs, NodeJS, Google Home, RaspberryPi Zero W, and my kids.

I made a tweet about this some time ago, and today I’d like to elaborate a little on the subject:

""HUEseless"" gift for you 😈... or your kids 🤭https://t.co/gPK0Q3Fwwu#PhilipsHUE #RaspberryPi #NodeJS #GoogleHome #KidsKeepSwitchingLightOnInsteadOfSleeping #BestDadEver #BadParentalAdvice pic.twitter.com/ugu0KsSfGG

— David Lacourt (@david_lacourt@mamot.fr) (@doppelganger9) March 3, 2019

My genius evil plan

The story is:

In 2016, I installed a Philips HUE lightbulb in my kids’ bedroom. Unfortunately, the room switch turns it off, and when turned back on, the HUE lightbulb goes back to white and 100% intensity. So the kids quickly learned that If I turn off the lights remotely with an app or Google Home, they simply need to play with the room switch off then on and they “win”.

So, as soon as I closed their door when time to sleep has had come, they would get up and turn it back on!

A war of turning on & off lights ensued.

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As a geek dad, I wanted to automate this into an evil AI, so that I can laugh madly while petting my cat, mwahahahahah!

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Gitlab Repository

As a gift, here is a link to the repository where you’ll find more details: https://gitlab.com/davidlacourt/hueseless

How does it work?

NodeJS

For this quick script thing of a project, I prefer JavaScript and NodeJS. For once, I did not write tests, because my kids tested it for me directly on production.

PhillipsHUE

The APIs are really easy to “HUE”-se.

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Just read the documentation and follow the tutorial, I did not meet any obstacle on the way. So I could hack an evil “AI” really quickly.

Evil AI (= 2 “IF”s)

Here is the evil AI pseudo-code:

IF you get data from API
   IF the light is on
   THEN turn it off

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Google Home

Just for the fun of it, I added voice to my script, so that instead of using console.log I would hear messages from it. When starting, it would say:

Light status monitoring enabled!

or when turning off the lights:

I turned off the lights.

I used node-googlehome repository/NPM library but had to tweak it a little to make it work, and ended up opening a PR.

RaspberryPi Zero W

The RaspberryPi Zero W is a mini version of the RaspberryPi which is already a really small computer.

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Once installed and built, I deployed this project on the RPi0W, which was really slow to npm install all the libs, but 10 minutes later, I could run the main loop.

I even added an auto-start to the Raspberry, which made it so that when powering up, it would automatically start my NodeJS script. Really nice!

For more details, I just followed this Medium article.

Results

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Well, it worked perfectly.

Except kids learn more quickly than my evil “AI”!

They learned that switching on/off a few dozen times made my code break. And even, instead of simply putting the lights on, for them it became a new game!

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So I ended the experiment there.

Now they go to sleep without any need to have a light so I can say it’s over.

Conclusion

In this short post, I wanted to show you a silly side-project mixing Google Home, NodeJS, Philips HUE, running on a RaspberryPI and evil AI in order to battle my smart kids. The result is working but they still outsmarted the whole contraption !

Anyway, I learned some things on the way.

I hope you too learned a few things or at least piqued your curiosity.

Thanks for reading this blog, If you have any questions, please use the Github Repository’s Issues to start a conversation, or use Twitter: my DMs are open.