One of the appealing things about Philips Hue is the ability to vary colour temperature and brightness based on the time of day. The links below explain the motivations for doing this, so I won't repeat them here:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/s2e1hx/upcoming_philips_hue_natural_daylight_simulation/
- https://huehomelighting.com/philips-hue-natural-daylight-simulation/
At the time that I created Helios, and at the time that I write this, there is no built-in way to have this happen fully automatically. Philips do sell a newer version of the switches I have, which are stated to support something like what I want, but the descriptions I'd seen didn't make it clear exactly what behaviour is possible.
However, even if they did support the behaviour I wanted, I didn't like the fact that to achieve functionality which ultimately is just a software thing I would have to replace all the switches I already have. Aside from the money, the bigger issue is the waste. Why should it be necessary to replace perfectly good switches with new ones which in terms of hardware aren't significantly different, just in order to gain access to a new software behaviour? It's a waste of the energy and materials that go into the producing the new switches, and of what went into producing the old switches, which it'd be unlikely I could usefully repurpose.
So - I wanted them to behave in a way that should be entirely possible with the existing hardware, and could see that it would be possible to achieve this using the Hue API, and software that I could write. Hence Helios.
As the two links above indicate, it sounds like Philips are working on a feature which could allow me to achieve what I want with the Philips software itself, and without having to replace the switches I have, but at the time that I created Helios, I was not aware of this. As the feature is not available at the time that I write this, I am still refining Helios. It may, however, not have a long life.
- https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise
- I discovered this pretty early on while researching and developing Helios, but decided to build my own solution so I could more easily achieve exactly what I want.
- https://github.com/stefanwichmann/kelvin
- I discovered this some time after having got Helios to the point that it pretty much does what I want. It sounds like it supports very similar behaviour to Helios but with more polish. I would probably have tried it and used it instead if I'd found it before creating Helios.