Huemulator

Huemulator acts as an emulator for the Philips Hue bridge.

It isn't a complete implementation, specifically the schedule API is not yet implemented but most of the rest of the API is there.

It runs as a node application, and you just connect your browser to it to see the current status. Each API call that is made to the emulator is mirrored on the web display, to ease debugging.
Details of the request and response are given if you click on the individual call.

Additional lights can be added on the website by clicking the "Add Light" button. There is no limit to the number of lights you can add (unlike with the official Hue bridge), but they won't all display at the moment.

The emulator is discoverable in the same way as the normal bridge is, so your standard UPnP discovery library should discover the emulator just as it would the bridge.

Installation

Huemulator is a node.js application, so you need to install node.js first. Then you can just

npm install -g huemulator

Running

Once installed, on Linux or Mac just run

sudo huemulator

You need the sudo because it listens per-default on port 80. You can specify a port on the command line if you don't want to run it on port 80, but bear in mind that there appears to be limitations with the SDK if you're not running your bridge on port 80 (there's obviously nothing wrong with running it on another port, as long as your library supports it, it should be fine).

On Windows, you'll probably need to run the huemulator command from a command prompt with administrator privileges. I've not tested this yet though.

Known Issues

The colour conversion routines are not right yet, specifically when you use the XY coordinates, the red component will be wrong (a green XY for example, has a considerable red component). The RGB values that come out of the conversion routine are also scaled incorrectly. I've posted a question to Philips regarding this.

The CT colour conversion is also a very rough approximation, and meant only to show a ball park colour. If I get some more information on how to properly convert the CT colour, I'll add it in (pull requests are welcome!)

The schedule API is not implemented at all.

Transitions, effects and alerts are not yet implemented. These would be a nice addition if anyone has time.

I've tested the emulator with the official Hue android app, and it works as expected (aside from the issues already discussed.)

It only supports the normal light bulb, not the strips. This could be added quite easily, once the colour conversion is fixed.

Contributing

Pull requests and issue reports are welcome. We specifically need help fixing the colour conversion routines in api/utility/color.js. There is some information on the Philips developer site, and more in the application design note for color conversion

If you own a hue, once we've got the colour conversions corrected, it would be great to compare the colours displayed and see if we can get them as near to the real thing as possible.

Once you've cloned the repository, just do a

npm install

to fetch the necessary node modules, and then a

bower install

to fetch the bower components.

Disclaimer

The is a weekend hack to better explore the Philips API, and have a better play with Angular.JS, as such, things might not be too smooth or there may be issues lurking. I went against my principals and didn't write tests, as there were too many new libraries for me to fight with. Sorry. When I'm more comfortable with the libraries, I'll restructure it a bit so that it's more testable, and write some proper tests.

Credits

Portions of the code are taken from the hue upnp emulator, many thanks for making that code public. I used the hue-simulator to fix some responses. The hue-simulator is an excellent project, if you just want to play with the API.