HomeKit Integration

[JnyJny]

It would be cool have to make the lights controlled by busylight be available for use with HomeKit. It appears that that easiest way to make this happen is via the Homebridge project.

• Write a Homebridge plugin to bridge between busylight web API and HomeKit
• Update busylight's web API as necessary

[Jaharmi]

The Home Assistant project also allows for HomeKit integration and is Python-based.

I know I've mistakenly created a lot of phantom HomeKit devices with HA, but that's about the extent of what I've done between HA and HomeKit.

[JnyJny]

I think I'll battle one bear at a time. The last time I played with Home Assistant I did not have a positive experience (trying to connect IKEA smart plugs to HomeKit).

[JnyJny]

Busylight Homebridge plugin

[trahloff]

Hi @JnyJny , thank you for creating this amazing project!

Did your perspective on Home Assistant change over the years? I don't know how it was in 2020, but it became an extremely mature and beloved platform with great support and a very active community.

I would love to integrate BusyLight for Humans into Home Assistant. Are there any plans to support this?

[Jaharmi]

@trahloff I've definitely thought about it, as well. I've never done an integration, but I've done a minimal REST setup to at least turn lights on/off and set some basic colors. If you have ideas, I'd be interested in helping somehow.

Update: See also this comment.

[stuart12]

Hello, I wanted to manage my light in HomeAssistant without having to configure anything in HomeAssistant so I wrote busylight-hass. This PoC automatically creates a light managed by busylight-core in HomeAssistant using MQTT discovery and aiomqtt. Once this script, systemd unit and udev rules are installed, plugging in a BlinkStickStrip (for example) will create a new MQTT light in every HomeAssistant instance connected to the same MQTT server. This MQTT light entity in HomeAssistant can immediately be used to switch the light on and off.

Let me know if busylight-hass (which perhaps could have been called busylight-mqtt) is of any use to you. Do you know how to open a light given its USB path (1-1.3:1.0 for example) without having to enumerate all HID devices?

[JnyJny]

Hi @stuart12 and thanks for adding your voice (and code!) to this issue. First, I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that the BlinkStickStrip is working, I only have a BlinkStickSquare to test with and I haven't been very confident about the other members of the BlinkStick family.

Second, kudos for putting together a HomeAssistant solution. This sort of work is what I hoped for when I created the busylight-core package. It's inspired me to put my Raspberry Pi back into service so it can be a place for HomeAssistant to live and I can play with the solution you've built.

Busylight Light Enumeration Class Methods

Ok, let's talk about device enumeration with busylight-core. My goal with busylight is to insulate the user from a lot of the details of their lights and make it as plug-and-play as possible. To this end, the busylight.Light class provides a several class methods that return all or a subset of the available USB lights. You'll notice at no time do I have to know any implementation details (like device path) to use the lights.

busylight.Light.all_lights()

The all_lights class method returns a list of Light instances for lights that are currently plugged in. If you have one light plugged in, expect to have one light in the list.

from busylight_core import Light

lights = Light.all_lights()

lights[0].on((255, 0, 0))
lights[1].on((0, 255, 0))
lights[2].on((0, 0, 255))

for light in lights:
    print(light.name)
    light.off()

busylight.Light.first_light()

The first_light() class method will return the first unused USB light discovered.

from busylight_core import Light

light = Light.first_light()
print(light.name)

light.on((0, 0x80, 0))
light.off()

Vendor-specific Light Classes

If you have a use case where you only want to interact with specific devices, you can dive into the busylight_core.vendor hierarchy of Light-subclasses. For instance:

from busylight_core import AgileInnovativeLights, BlinkStickStrip, Light

def turn_on(lights: list[Light]) -> None:
    for light in lights:
        print(light.name)
        light.on((255, 255, 255))

def quiesce(lights: list[Light]) -> None:

    for light in lights:
        light.off()
        light.release()
    lights.clear()

# work with only devices from vendor Agile Innovative

lights = AgileInnovativeLights.all_lights()

turn_on(lights)
quiesce(lights)

# work with only devices identified as BlinkStickStrip

lights = BlinkStickStrip.all_lights()

turn_on(lights)
quiesce(lights) 

light = BlinkStickStrip.first_light()
light.on((255, 0, 0))
light.off()

But I haven't answered your question:

Do you know how to open a light given its USB path (1-1.3:1.0 for example) without having to enumerate all HID devices?

As I've attempted to show, I don't expect most people to know that their devices have a USB path, let alone know what it might be. To answer your question, the first solution that comes to mind is fetching all the lights and filtering for a specific USB path:

from busylight_core import Light

lights = Light.all_lights()

specific_lights = filter(lambda l: l.path.endswith("1-1.3:1.0"), lights)

# release lights that were not selected by the filter.  We could just call `lights.clear()`
# and let the lights get cleaned up when they are garbage collected but that adds 
# some latency to when the lights are available for use again by this or another
# process. 

for light in lights:
    if light not in specifc_lights:
        light.release()
        del light

lights.clear()

Filter Lower by Hardware

You could filter lower in the stack using busylight_core.hardware.Hardware which manages enumeration of USB devices and I/O to the hardware, performing a similar filter on the results of Hardware.enumerate() and then instantiating lights "by hand" rather than using the factory class methods. I don't recommend this since you would have to do some searching to find the Light subclass that claims that particular hardware instance and then use that subclass to create an instance.

Conclusion

I'm curious what problem you are solving, I suspect it's presenting a consistent device view to Home Assistant but I don't want to presume. I could be persuaded to change / augment the busylight_core.Light API to return lights based on a predicate ( like path == "something" ) if the filtering I've demonstrated doesn't solve your problem.

[stuart12]

hi @JnyJny thanks for creating busylight-core. It is a good base for adding lights to HomeAssistant. I have added an Architecture section to the README in busylight-hass explaining why it would be useful to only enumerate lights with a given path. Let me know if this is not clear. You can see my deleted attempts to open a light at given USB path in stuart12/busylight-hass@3b6912d. I gave up as I thought that my time was better spent implementing MQTT discovery for Hass.

[stuart12]

blinkstick-strip lights do work but I sometimes see what I presume is a hardware bug. Sometimes (several times a week), when busylight-core switches the light off, not all of the leds turn off. Some of the top leds (those furthest from the connector) remain on. I will then have to switch the light off many times until fewer leds remain and then finally all leds turn off. I saw the same problem when using the blinksticklight integration in HomeAssistant so it is not a bug in busylight-core. BTW the HomeAssistant blinksticklight integration was disabled in home-assistant/core#121846 but the documentation was not updated. If I see this bug too often I will add code to busylight_hass to switch the leds off one by one as a possible workaround.

[JnyJny]

Thanks for the architecture section! Between that and reading your code I got a better feel for the problem you are trying to solve.

I've added an issue JnyJny/busylight-core#33 and updated busylight-core with a new class method busylight_core.light.Light.at_path which should address your use case:

from busylight_core import Light, NoLightsFoundError

try:
    light = Light.at_path("os-dep-path-representation")
except NoLightsFoundError:
    print("No light found for path")

I've also added a new predicate optional callable argument to all_lights and first_light if you need a more flexible way to filter devices before they are acquired.

from busylight_core import Hardware, Light, NoLightsFoundError

def is_beef(hardware: Hardware) -> bool:
    return hardware.product_id == 0xbeef

# Get the first light matching predicate

beef_light = Light.first_light(predicate=is_beef)

# Get remaining lights matching predicate

beef_lights = Light.all_lights(predicate=is_beef)

Let me know if that's solves your problem, if not we can keep iterating towards a solution.

The updated API is in version 0.15.3 of busylight-core which I just published.

[stuart12]

thanks @JnyJny at_path does the job, see stuart12/busylight-hass@4a04634