Philips unveils open APIs and IOS SDK for Hue lighting system

The Philips Hue is an interesting WI-FI connected lighting system of standard looking light bulbs. Making use of a smartphone or tablet the Hue lightning system allows you to play with tone, brightness and colour to create your ideal lighting and mood as well as turn lights on and off remotely. Well now there`s a developers kit for them.


TechCrunch reports:


'Philips recognized that devs wanted to do different things with the Hue, and decided to help them out, by opening up an official developer program, complete with an SDK for iOS developers, and APIs that allow both software and hardware makers to take advantage of the Hue’s connected features. The official tool means that developers can depend on it as a stable channel through which to build Hue integration into their products.

Hue uses the ZigBee standard for home automation, which means that they can talk to each other, as well as motion detectors, connected thermostats, connected appliances and more. The new developer program will mean that hardware makers using these standards can build in Hue-compatible features, so that the lights can be triggered by various actions. You could have a specific light recipe come on whenever you open the door, for instance, or when a thermostat is set to specific climate setting.

Other potential uses of the developer tools include apps for amateur and professional photographers, which could help them optimize lighting for a shoot with a simple app attached to a device with light level detection capabilities. Philips also plans to release future features around geo-fencing, scheduling and other smartphone sensor capabilities that could expand what developers can do with them."

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