I recently bought a Raspberry Pi Zero W mood light kit on Pimoroni. I’ve been looking for a project to practice my python and thought playing with lights would be fun. After assembling said light (I recommend the solderless set by the way, unless you really like soldering) and playing with it, I wanted to control it along with the Philips Hue lights which are around my desk – via HomeKit.
Pimoroni has a guide to set up Mote lights via HomeKit , so with some tweaking I got it running.
Make sure you install the software first. Then I had to modify their code – I don’t have Mote lights, but I have the Unicorn pHAT. So instead of importing mote I had to import unicornhat, and very importantly I had to change the dimension of the lights – if you try to set lights that don’t exist on the unicorn pHAT then it won’t work. Despite doing this I had some problems with floats being returned instead of integers, so I changed all the division to use // instead of / which resolved that issue nicely. Here’s the code for the API:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from colorsys import hsv_to_rgb, rgb_to_hsv
import unicornhat as unicorn
from flask import Flask, jsonify, make_response
app = Flask(__name__)
unicorn.set_layhout(unicorn.PHAT)
unicorn.brightness(0.5)
width, height = unicorn.get_shape()
colour = 'FFFFFF'
status = 0
def hex_to_rgb(value):
value = value.lstrip('#')
length = len(value)
return tuple(int(value[i:i + length // 3], 16) for i in range(0, length, length // 3))
def unicorn_on(c):
r, g, b = hex_to_rgb(c)
for channel in range(width):
for pixel in range(height):
unicorn.set_pixel(channel, pixel, int(r), int(g), int(b))
unicorn.show()
return True
def unicorn_off():
unicorn.clear()
unicorn.show()
return True
def get_status():
global status
for channel in range(width):
for pixel in range(height):
if unicorn.get_pixel(channel, pixel) != (0, 0, 0):
status = 1
return status
@app.route('/unicorn/api/v1.0/<string:st>', methods=['GET'])
def set_status(st):
global status, colour
if st == 'on':
status = 1
unicorn_on(colour)
elif st == 'off':
status = 0
unicorn_off()
elif st == 'status':
status = get_status()
return jsonify({'status': status, 'colour': colour})
@app.route('/unicorn/api/v1.0/set', methods=['GET'])
def get_colour():
global colour
return jsonify({'status': status, 'colour': colour})
@app.route('/unicorn/api/v1.0/set/<string:c>', methods=['GET'])
def set_colour(c):
global status, colour
colour = c
if status != 0:
unicorn_on(colour)
status = 1
return jsonify({'status': status, 'colour': colour})
@app.errorhandler(404)
def not_found(error):
return make_response(jsonify({'error': 'Not found'}), 404)
if __name__ == '__main__':
unicorn_off()
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True)(I can’t claim any credit here, I just modified their example to work for the unicorn pHAT instead of Mote.)
Next I had to add the light to my HomeBridge installation. I ran sudo npm install -g homebridge-better-http-rgb, added the following configuration and restarted HomeBridge. Make sure to replace the IP address with your light, or with localhost if you’re running HomeBridge on the same machine as your light.
{
"accessory": "HTTP-RGB",
"name": "MoodLight",
"switch": {
"status": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/status",
"powerOn": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/on",
"powerOff": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/off"
},
"brightness": {
"status": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/brightness",
"url": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/brightness/%s"
},
"color": {
"status": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/set",
"url": "http://10.0.0.116:5000/unicorn/api/v1.0/set/%s",
"brightness": true
}
}Here’s a video of the light in action.
VIDEO
