My Work-from-Home "office" is in a dark corner of my house, I wanted a way to keep track of time and also look well lit in video calls. My solution was to get the Philips Hue Light Bar and write a program to control the lights based off of events in my calendar. Check out a video of the experience.

Hue Python API, I'm using Qhue to make interactions with the Bridge easier (see that project for installation instructions). To install under Python3, you may have to use pip3:

pip3 install qhue

To read configuration files, we're using pyyaml. To install under Python 3, run:

pip3 install pyyaml

Enable the Google Calendar API for your Google account and install the client library. Reference the Python Calendar API as needed. To install under Python3 you may have to use pip3:

pip3 install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib

Hue Lights API (you will to sign up for a developer account to access) to understand what's available.

Go through the Get Started page on the Hue Developers site to use the CLIP API Debugger to register a new username. Replace the BRIDGE_IP and BRIDGE_USERNAME variables in the script, the LIGHTS array to match your lights, and update the LOGGING variable as necessary and execute with:

python3 work_lights.py

If you want to run it as a background process, set LOGGING to False and run with

python3 work_lights.py &