Automating Hue Labs Formulas

Phillips Hue Labs provide many interesting formulas that provide functionality the app iteslf can not do. This functionality is really useful and some of these formulas expose toggles in a Hue Labs Controls panel. This panel lets you switch the formula on and off.

The Phillips Hue API is really well documented, so I expected the task of toggling a hue labs formula to be very straight-forward. To my dismay, the docs do not provide any information on how to interact with any of the Hue Labs formulas.

Fortunately, there is a way to toggle these formula controls via the local API. I give credit to this post on reddit for information on how to accomplish this task.

The first step is to query your local API’s resourcelinks to find the Hue Labs Formula that you are interested in toggling. Replace your Hue Bridge IP Address and your local username in the httpie command below. I modified the output for brevity.

$ http http://192.168.1.2/api/<your-user-name>/resourcelinks

{
    "1234": {
        "classid": 2,
        "description": "xi3hg844QB2iN23DPO3K_A:2:4rK80TTxqDFYZvS3+pY12QHPUdT",
        "links": [
            "/rules/1",
            "/rules/2",
            "/schedules/10",
            "/schedules/11",
            "/sensors/15",
            "/scenes/hhhGmoHbTfzD0Gs",
            "/scenes/p97cGGHbvMYPIE0",
            "/groups/12",
            "/groups/13"
        ],
        "name": "Advanced presence mimicking",
        "owner": "93kd9a03-917b-43d9-1133-ff81e00003e6",
        "recycle": true,
        "type": "Link"
    }
}

Find the formula that you want to toggle, in my case I was looking for the Advanced presence mimicking formula. In the links key there are a list of endpoints. Find the one that begins with /sensors/. The ID in this endpoint will be used to toggle the formula. In the example above we want to modify the sensor with the ID of 15.

To toggle this formula do a HTTP PUT request to /api/<your-user-name>/sensors/<sensor-id>/state. The body should include a single key, status with the value of 0 to disable it and 1 to enable it.

$ http -v PUT http://192.168.1.174/api/<your-user-name>/sensors/<sensor-id>/state status:=1
PUT /api/<your-user-name>/sensors/15/state HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 13
Content-Type: application/json
Host: 192.168.1.174
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.9.2

{
    "status": 1
}

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, HEAD
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Max-Age: 3600
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 02:12:45 GMT
Expires: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 09:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server: nginx

[
    {
        "success": {
            "/sensors/15/state/status": 1
        }
    }
]

You can now use this HTTP call in scripts and automations within home-assistant and/or node-red.