Scripting the colorful LEDs in my office

Finally, Wireshark to the rescue, I got my LimitlessLED home office RGB LEDs scripted.

In plain English: I can now send commands from a computer to my lights via WiFi and their base station, and they will turn on or off or red or blue or bright-white or “party” or whatever. While I previously could do that with their remote control, and via their iPhone app, now I can do it directly, from software I control. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities …

I wanted to do that ever since I got the lights, but the very confusing documentation on their developer site is just about incomprehensible and I couldn’t get it to work.

So for reference, this is how it works (for me, they have different models and the codes may be slightly different for your model):

• All commands are two bytes long and sent over UDP.
• The base station listens at port 8899.
• The easiest way to send those two bytes is plain-old echo, and netcat, like this:

echo -n -e "\x22\x00" | nc -u 192.168.100.105 8899 -w 0

• Here I’m sending 0x22 followed by 0x00, if the IP address of the base station is 192.168.100.105.
• Here are the commands I know of it understands (from having Wireshark watch the iPhone app talk to the base station), all in hex:

If the top bit is set, it means “the button was pressed long” (e.g. a100 vs 2100). If the first byte starts with 4 instead of 2, it means “brighter”.

Which possibilities? Lots of them, like:

• Turn the lights on automatically (and gradually) as it gets dark outside.
• Flash the lights in red 5 min before my next conference call.
• Flash the lights in green somebody is at the front door.
• Turn on party lights for 5 min every hour of work, to remember the get up and move around.

There will be more ideas ...

Update Feb. 2018: More content for the above table. And there’s some code to drive this at github.com/jernst/milight.