MQTT-Lightify

Installation

Clone the git repository, optionally run tests with setup.py test, and run setup.py install.

Invocation

To run the bridge with default settings (both mqtt-broker and lightify access bridge on localhost), just run

python -m mqtt-lightify

Since the bridge is usually not located on localhost and the broker could run on any host in your network, there are two command line parameters to set them:

python -m mqtt-lightify --broker=127.0.0.1 --bridge=192.168.x.x

If you need to use a non standard port for your broker, use the following syntax: --broker=127.0.0.1:1883. The port for the Lightify bridge is fixed to 4000.

The optional parameters --transition_lum, --transition_temp and --transition_rgb can be used to set transition time for luminance (brightness), color and color temperature changes, respectively. Transition time must be given in 1/10 seconds, e.g. for a 1 second luminance transition time use:

python -m mqtt-lightify --broker=127.0.0.1 --bridge=192.168.x.x --transition_lum=10

Addionally, if your mqtt bridge requires a user name and password those can be set as command line parameters like:

python -m mqtt-lightify --broker=127.0.0.1 --bridge=192.168.x.x --username=user --password=some_password

Instead of --password you can also use --b64password to give the same base64 encoded.

python -m mqtt-lightify --broker=127.0.0.1 --bridge=192.168.x.x --username=user --b64password='c29tZV9wYXNzd29yZA=='

For simplified use in isolated environments, you can also provide these using the environment variables BROKER_ADDRESS, BRIDGE_ADDRESS,BROKER_USER and BROKER_PASSWD respectively. Here BROKER_PASSWD must be set base64 encoded to have some basic level of concealment.

Base64 encoded passwords can be obtained like:

python
>>>import base64
>>> base64.b64encode(b'some_password')
b'c29tZV9wYXNzd29yZA=='

Docker

This package can easily deployed as a docker container, a sample Dockerfile is provided, just update the environment variable to your needs. It uses python:3.6-alpine as base image which usually results in a container smaller than 100MB. It has no published ports and no external volumes, so configuration is quite minimal.

The provided shell-script build-image.sh creates an image named python-mqtt-lightify-bridge:%Y%m%d-%H%M%S and tags it with python-mqtt-lightify-bridge:latest. You can run the image with

docker rm mqtt-lightify
docker run --name mqtt-lightify -d python-mqtt-lightify-bridge:latest

or just use the provided run-image.sh.

Usage

This project tries to follow the MQTT-Smarthome proposal. This means, that the bridge subscribes to specific topics on the broker and responds with messages at a certain format. More details are described at the MQTT-Smarthome repository.

Status reports

/lightify/status/<device-id>/<datapoint>

If the bridge is asked for a device status, it reports all available datapoints at this topic. There will be one message for each available datapoint at its specific topic published.

The message format is as follows:

{
    "val": <value>,
    "ts": <message creation timestamp>,
    "lightify": {
        "bridge": "<bridge ip>",
        "device": <device id>,
        "deviceName": "<device name>",
        "deviceType": "<device type>",
        "deviceTypeValue": <numerical representation of the device type>,
        "deviceSubType": "<device subtype>",
        "deviceSubTypeValue": <numerical representation of the device subtype>,
        "addr": <device address>,
        "idx": <device index>,
        "datapoint": "<datapoint name>",
        "datapointType": "<datapoint type>"
    }
}

value	data type	description
val	any	datapoint value
ts	int	timestamp (in milliseconds) when the message was created
lightify.bridge	str	IP-address of the hardware brige
lightify.device	int	device ID, should be unique for each device
lightify.deviceName	str	the name reported by te device
lightify.deviceType	str	one of lightify.DeviceType (currently LIGHT, PLUG, SENSOR or SWITCH)
lightify.deviceTypeValue	int	the internal numerical representation of the device type
lightify.deviceSubType	str	one of lighitfy.DeviceSubType (currently LIGHT_FIXED_WHITE, LIGHT_TUNABLE_WHITE, LIGHT_RGB, LIGHT_RGBW, PLUG, SWITCH, CONTACT_SENSOR or MOTION_SENSOR)
lightify.deviceSubTypeValue	int	the internal numerical representation of the device subtype
lightify.addr	int	device address, ths seems to be the same as lightify.device
lightify.idx	int	index number of unknown function
lightify.datapoint	str	datapoint name, this should be reported the same as the datapoint in the message topic
lightify.datapointType	str	data type of the datapoint. This is not implemented yet, contains bla

Set value

/lightify/set/<device-id>/<datapoint>

Sets the value of a datapoint on the given device. The datapoints differ from the dtapoints reported back in status messages. The following datapoints are currently supported:

• STATE: If the message payload is "true", "1" or 1, turns the device on. All other values turn the device off.
• RGB: Sets the RGB value. The value has to be provided in HTML-hex-format, either with or without leading #. Example: a payload of #ff0000 turns the light red, 00ff00 green etc. The characters are case insensitive. Note that this does not turn on the device and setting the value on an switched off device does not necessarily mean that the color has changed if the device is turned on afterwards.
• LUM: Sets the luminance of the device. Accepts an integer or a string which os astable to an integer between 0 and 100. The value is interpreted as percentage.
• TEMP: Sets the color temperature on devices supporting color temperature. The value has to be between MIN_TEMPand MAX_TEMP which both can be obtained by reading the status of that device.

Setting the device values is vastly simplified and cut down to the possibilities that are available to the single device I own, which is a RGBW bulb. Improvements (and pull requests) are very welcome!

Get status

/lightify/get/<device-id>

Since the bridge is passive and does not poll information from the devices (at the moment), you'll have to poll the status information yourself, either before each operation or periodically. This can be done by publishing a message to the above topic. This causes the bridge to publish the status report on the selected device at the topic /lightify/status/<device-id>/<datapoint> for each known datapoint on that device. The message payload sent with the message is ignored.

Device discovery

/lightify/command

To discover attached devices, a client can send a message to the above topic. There is currently one supported command, INFO. This can be invoked by sending a message payload to the command channel like this:

{
    "command": "INFO",
    "param": <lightify method name>
}

Note: this is absolute work in progress and not finally implemented yet! The safe way to see the device ids of the connected devices is to look at the logs at startup.

Using the bridge in your own programs

If the bridge is started via th above command line invocation, it instantiates the main class as follows:

bridge = MqttLightify(broker_address=BROKER_ADDRESS, bridge_address=BRIDGE_ADDRESS)
bridge.start(loop_forever=True)

If loop_forever is provided, this basically calls the same method on the mqtt client and waits for keyboard interrupt. If its not provided, the method calls loop_start on the mqtt client and returns. This can be used to integrate the bridge in your own programs. The event loop runs until the stop method is called or the program ends.