Philips Hue reverse-engineering/clone?

[casper.bang]

I have completed a nice large greenhouse for the wife. Her geek husband added 10W amorph solar cells, a charge controller and battery to keep the greenhouse truly green. The wife would like LED RGB strip and that's fine and dandy, except I'd like something a la the Philips Hue bulbs (8W) which can be controlled over wifi and where you can interface with a REST API. I thought of taking apart such a bulb, and just do away with the 230->12 DC-DC converter, but it won't exactly become an LED strip. So I wonder, are anyone of you aware of people doing their own version using a Hue compatible API connecting discrete RGB LED strips?

If I were to dive into this myself, what's the cheapest wifi "internet-of-things" capable platform? (I prefer non-Arduino AVR stuff)

[Gallymimus]

did you ever get anywhere with this?

We are working on a public art sculpture and this might be handy to know.

[marshallh]

How about Teensy 3.1 + ESP8266

[Corporate666]

Philips actually makes light strips for the Hue system

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HD231VC/A/philips-friends-of-hue-lightstrips

I've taken apart the Hue bulbs... while it is tri-color LED's, they use the (until recently, not for sale to the public) lime green LED's instead of standard green.  The lime green is somewhere between green and amber, which gives a much closer result to an RGBA color mixing setup than traditional RGB.  In other words, you can get most colors in the rainbow while maintaining a really good CRI.

Only downside of the Hue setup is that it never fully turns off the lime green, so red is more like pink, and yellow isn't really possible... more of a very pale green.

[onesixright]

Just a update, i ran into this website:

https://peeveeone.com/?p=287

This guys created a "hue" compatible "client" based on a NXP JN5168 (zigbee chip). Should be pretty straight forward, awesome ! 

So, you can now make your "own" (cheap) bulbs 

[JolyGoodDay]

On this note, I am trying to make my own but have yet to find a good source of empty lightbulbs that can screw together. I would even take a working lightbulb that I can take apart without a high chance of broken glass or broken plastic.

Anyone have any ideas on how to make a good looking fixture that can screw into all E26 sockets?

[james_s]

The cree "Flow" LED bulbs are easy to disassemble. The inexpensive Philips A19 bulbs are relatively easy to get apart. Lots of cheap Chinese LED bulbs on ebay and whatnot that you could cannibalize. If you're making your own electronics that ought to be reasonably safe.

[JolyGoodDay]

Yea those are good suggestions, I was looking to buy bulk pre-disassembled. Like 50-100 empty shells.

[onesixright]

Just a heads-up

The change that your own bulbs will work with Homekit is almost zero. It should work with the Phillips Hue app, but Hue doesn't "hand-off" 3rd party bulbs to Homekit.

So "Hey SIRI, light up the x-mas tree!" probably doesn't work! ;-)