Amazon Dash and Philips Hue

When the Amazon Dash came out a few years ago, I thought it was an April Fool's joke. A button that you install somewhere in your house to order one specific product from Amazon? That's crazy!

It didn't take long for people to figure out how to use the button for something other than ordering products from Amazon. No higher hacking is required and at USD$ 4.99 a pop, quite affordable. When not in use, the button isn't connected to the wifi. So when you click it, the first thing it does is set up that connection. A script monitoring the local network can easily detect this event and then do something arbitrary - like order beer.

There are many hacks around, but none of them do exactly what I want:

• When the last person leaves the house, all lights should switch off
• When the first person comes back, all lights should switch back on

So I wrote a script that doesn't just monitor the Dash button, but also the presence of the phones of me and my wife on the local network. The basic rules are:

• If any lights are on, switch them off when:
• - the button was pressed
• - no phones were seen on the network for 20 minutes
• If any lights have been previously switched off, switch them on when:
• - the button was pressed
• - a phone is seen after 20 minutes of no phones

This way, the button can always be used to switch on or off the lights, but if you don't switch off the lights when leaving home, they will go off automatically. Unlike with a motion controlled set up, this won't happen if you are home but not moving (though it will happen if your phone runs out of battery). When you come home and you had previously switched off the lights using the button, they will come on automatically.

To get this working, check out the code, install the requirements and run: 

python auto_lights --hue_bridge=<bridge-ip> --phone_mac=<phone-macs> --dash_mac=<dash-mac>

While running, the program will also print any new mac addresses it detects and for extra convenience it also prints the manufacturer. You can use this to find out the mac address of your phone and of the dash button - switch your phone to airplane mode, wait for things to quiet down and when you switch airplane mode off, you should see your phone's mac address.

It works reasonably well. The longest I've seen my phone not contacting the wifi was 13 minutes, so 20 minutes seems safe. Coming home, it takes a little longer than ideal for the phone to reconnect to the wifi, but you can use the Dash button if you are in a hurry.

As always the code is on Github.