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by mjg59 3705 days ago
I picked up a http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017CKVG7G a couple of months ago - it's pretty terrible in terms of build quality and range, but it's a simple Bluetooth LE protocol for full RGB control of the lights, and you can run multiple sets off a single machine with a bluetooth 4.0 controller. Rather than using a custom protocol I bridged it to something that emulates enough of a Hue hub for the Amazon Echo to let me control it. I don't know how the economics compare, but there's plenty of avenues to explore here.
1 comments

Well hey, would you look at that. Exactly what I'm trying to do!

Heh I was shooting for the REST API because I figured there's nothing that doesn't communicate through it today. I'll have to check into it more, especially if I decide to do dedicated stuffs down the line. I am a fan of the multiple strips thing.

The bridge code is at https://github.com/mjg59/ulfire but doesn't have the Bluetooth code since I haven't got it working reliably yet (the machine I'm testing with has an ancient version of Bluez, and I need to upgrade that before doing more testing). I'll push that in the near future. It's pretty board specific though, I've found at least 6 different Bluetooth LE protocols for lighting so far. The easiest way to do it for testing is to just call out to gatttool in the callbacks.
I'm not a huge fan of using Bluetooth for this application, but you've done some great work there .. I'll have to look into your implementation of the Hue API, maybe we could use it on the MagicShifter (which uses WiFi instead of BT)... ?