lightsd, a daemon to control smart bulbs

lightsd acts a central point of control for your LIFX_ WiFi bulbs. lightsd should be a small, simple and fast daemon exposing an easy to use protocol inspired by how musicpd_ works.

Having to run a daemon to control your LIFX bulbs may seem a little bit backward but has some advantages:

• no discovery delay ever, you get all the bulbs and their state right away;
• lightsd is always in sync with the bulbs and always knows their state;
• lightsd act as an abstraction layer and can expose new discovery mechanisms and an unified API across different kind of smart bulbs;
• For those of you with a high paranoia factor, lightsd let you place your bulbs in a totally separate and closed network.

.. _LIFX: http://lifx.co/ .. _musicpd: http://www.musicpd.org/

Current features

lightsd discovers your LIFX bulbs, stays in sync with them and support the following commands through a JSON-RPC_ interface:

• power_off (with auto-retry);
• power_on (with auto-retry);
• power_toggle (power on if off and vice-versa, with auto-retry);
• set_light_from_hsbk;
• set_waveform (change the light according to a function like SAW or SINE);
• get_light_state;
• set_label;
• tag/untag (group/ungroup bulbs together).

The JSON-RPC interface works on top of TCP/IPv4/v6, Unix sockets, or over a command pipe (named pipe, see mkfifo(1)_).

lightsd can target single or multiple bulbs at once:

• by device address;
• by device label;
• by tag;
• broadcast;
• composite (list of targets);

lightsd works and is developed against a variety of LIFX firmwares from the oldest ones to the newest ones.

.. _JSON-RPC: http://www.jsonrpc.org/specification .. _mkfifo(1): http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mkfifo

Documentation

lightsd is packaged for Mac OS X, Arch Linux, Debian based systems and OpenWRT. Check out https://docs.lightsd.io/latest/ for installation instructions and a walk-through some interactive examples.

lightsd and monolight, an user interface for a programmable button array, were presented at Fosdem 2017. Check out the slides for a presentation of lightsd's capabilities, architecture and an example of project built with lightsd: https://downloads.lightsd.io/slides/fosdem/fosdem_2017.pdf.

Requirements

lightsd aims to be highly portable on any slightly POSIX system and on any kind of hardware including embedded devices. Hence why lightsd is written in C with reasonable dependencies:

• libevent ≥ 2.0.19 (released in May 2012);
• CMake ≥ 2.8.9 (released in August 2012): only if you want to build lightsd from its sources.

lightsd is actively developed and tested from Arch Linux, Debian, Mac OS X, OpenWRT and OpenBSD; both for 32/64 bits and little/big endian architectures.

Native Windows support has been kept in mind, but isn't really the focus.

Contact

Feel free to reach out via email or irc (#lightsd_ on Freenode, insist if I don't reply). As the project name implies, I'm fairly interested in other smart bulbs.

Check out the contribution guide_ for the vision behind the project and how to contribute.

Join the conversation on the LIFX forum_.

.. _#lightsd: irc://chat.freenode.net/#lightsd .. _contribution guide: https://github.com/lopter/lightsd/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst .. _LIFX forum: https://community.lifx.com/t/lightsd-a-daemon-with-a-json-rpc-api-to-control-your-bulbs/446

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