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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

LIFX bulbs work without the need to connect to the internet. They have a LAN protocol that's pretty easy to use.

I believe Philips Hue also does this correctly. I don't own any of the Hue products, last I looked (a few years ago) they had an open API. Currently it looks like you have to sign up for a developer account, I don't know if this is purely for email marketing or if they have know restricted API access. The downside to Hue was always the bridge, which is what exposed the http API.

LIFX looks nice though. The UDP Lan protocol is really neat, and the documentation is better than I remember of Philips Hue.

I have a Hue setup, and you only need to signup for a developer account to use their cloud API. If you're on your local network, the bridge has a REST API exposed and you can just start issuing requests to it without any signing up for anything.

In my experience, when I researched some of the official forums some time ago, there was no public documentation of the protocols. I still have to use the Android app to onboard a bulb (which will fail if you forget to deactivate mobile data on your phone). Then, I was pretty satisfied using lifxlan in Python (https://github.com/mclarkk/lifxlan)

There is absolutely public documentation [1] and has been for years. I've used it extensively to help maintain a Go connector [2]. It's a binary protocol and it's just a matter of spraying your network with broadcast UDP packets.

1. https://lan.developer.lifx.com/

2. https://github.com/2tvenom/golifx

Thanks, I need to go back and re-read those docs. My problem was with the onboarding. From a quick look your library assumes the bulbs are already onboarded, like the one in Python?

My former flatmate bought a nanoleaf Aurora, which we used primarily as a visualizer for our sound system. It had a pretty well-documented REST API though, and I did a couple nifty things with it

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