Controlling Philips Hue lamps with a Pebble smartwatch

As far as I know, at this moment there is no direct way to control Philips Hue lamps using a Pebble smartwatch. A workaround is possible though, with the help of a webserver that sends the right commands to the Hue bridge as you visit a specific webpage. Here’s how I did it.

Short demonstration on Youtube

What I used:

Philips Hue starter pack including Hue bridge (plus several Hue, Living Colors and Living Whites lamps which can be controlled by the bridge)
iPhone 4S
Pebble smartwatch
Smartwatch Pro app for iOS and the included WatchApp to be run on the Pebble
PC acting as a webserver (eeepc 4G, an older and relatively cheap netbook) on my local network
Debian GNU/Linux with Apache, PHP5, Phue, Composer, php5-curl

The steps as I recall them:

Make sure you can control the lamps using the Hue app for the iPhone.
Register your own ‘username’ with the Hue bridge as explained in http://developers.meethue.com/gettingstarted.html (Phue includes a tool to do this as well). You can test if you can control the lamps from your web browser using the Clip debugger.
Install Debian GNU/Linux on a suitable machine (just about any pc-like system that you can keep running on your network). For installation instructions, see http://www.debian.org/distrib/ At installation, make sure you select the task webserver. A full desktop system is not necessary for this purpose.
The Apache webserver and PHP5 should already be installed. If not already done, install package php5-curl (aptitude install php5-curl) as well.
Install Composer. At this moment it’s not an included package, so you can use these steps:

apt-get install curl

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Make a subdirectory (folder) in /var/www where your webpages will be located.
Install Phue by creating a composer.json file in the web folder

{        
"require": { "sqmk/phue": "*" }
}

and then running

composer install

create php webpages like the following (call it lamp1.php for example). Make sure you have the right IP address of the Hue bridge and the previously registered username.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Turn on lamp 1</title>
  </head>
  <body>
     <h1>Lamp 1</h1>

<?php

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

$client = new PhueClient('192.168.1.2', 'thisismyhueusername');

try {
    (new PhueCommandPing)->send($client);
} catch (PhueTransportExceptionConnectionException $e) {
    echo 'There was a problem accessing the bridge';
}

// Manually send command to get light by id
$light = $client->sendCommand(
    new PhueCommandGetLightById(1)
);
echo $light->getName(), "n";
$light->setOn(true);
// Setting brightness (0 for no light, 255 for max brightness)
$light->setBrightness(255);
// Set color temp (153 min, 500 max), changes color mode to 'ct'
$light->setColorTemp(400);

?>

  </body>
</html>

Open the created webpage from a web browser in your network and see if it works.
Install the iOS app Smartwatch Pro, run it and install the watchapp on your Pebble. It doesn’t have to be Smartwatch Pro, but any app that can open a web address by pushing a button on the Pebble.
In Smartwatch Pro on the iPhone, enable the HTTP requests option, and add a HTTP request to the webpage you just created.
In the Smartwatch watchapp on your Pebble, select the HTTP request and enjoy 🙂

To see what you can do with Phue, check https://github.com/sqmk/Phue and the Hue developers information at http://developers.meethue.com/

Controlling Philips Hue lamps with a Pebble smartwatch

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