How to create "scenes" with the philips hue API

Question

Does anybody know how Philips implemented "scenes" in their hue api? With an app you can select an image and move every bulb to a color pixel and change the intensity. All lamps can have different colors and brightness levels and everything is saved as a "scene". However, when retreiving "scene" information; you only get an array of which lights are used in a scene, no detailed info is given. Since you can schedule the scenes, philips must have stored this information on the hub. The API does not even describe the "scenes". I have seen 3rd party apps that do create scenes, so it's not entirely secret...

miknik miknik · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-06T21:21:50

I realise this is an old post, but I couldn't find an answer to this anywhere so I had a play around and figured it out myself. Hopefully useful to someone.

I don't have enough reputation to post the code snippets, but you can see the instructions in this post on Google+

https://plus.google.com/111036301775898522222/posts/iMt2hVdJvYo

First you address

</code>http://BRIDGE IP/api/APP ID/scenes/SCENENAME</code>

I think the scene name cannot contain spaces. PUT the lights you want in the scene in the body like so

{"lights":["3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10","11","12","13","14","15","16","17"],"name":"SCENENAME"}

Then you specify the condition for each bulb in the scene using PUT at

<code>http://BRIDGE IP/api/APP ID/scenes/SCENENAME/lights/BULBNUMBER/state</code>

I found you could specify values in whichever format you want, no need to include all values. My body looked like this

{"on":true,"bri":254,"xy":[0.1631,0.0206]}

Then once values are set for each bulb in the scene you activate it at

</code>http://BRIDGE IP/api/APP ID/groups/0/action</code>

with the body

{"scene":"SCENENAME"}

How to create "scenes" with the philips hue API

2 Answers