And A Light Bulb Lights Up

Several people today linked to Tickle. Now I have heard about Tickle before. I even have it listed in my blog post about Programming With Blocks. But today I looked at it again and among the listed supported devices in the Philips Hue. It turns out that I listed the Philips Hue as a supported device along with several types of robots and Arduino devices and drones but I never looked closely at the Hue. What is the Hue? In short it is a software controlled light bulb.

The lights connect wirelessly to a hub that can control up to 50 light bulbs. That hub connects to your Internet. One controls the various lights using smart phone apps. There are apps available for the major phones Apple, Android and even Windows. Obviously Tickle is one of the tools that lets one write software to control the lights but there are many more. There are also APIs for Philips Hue.  There appear to be several for Python for example. A bunch for JavaScript. And three for C# – which are the ones I’m looking at first.

The bulbs are not cheap by any means but they are not as expensive as some robots either. I may have to get a couple of try them out over the summer.