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.

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.

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.