Connecting Phillips Hue lights without an internet connected router

July 26, 2014 1:51 PM

I'm currently setting up for my wedding reception tonight, and we'd planned to use our Philips Hue bulbs for lighting. We brought our router, hub, and lights, but the venue only has wifi, and it looks like the router needs an internet connection to have everything working. HALP. Details inside.

Ok, here's what we have: 15 Hue bulbs, the Hue hub, a Motorola Surfboard cable modem/router (SPG6782-AC), a Lenovo Thinkpad, two network cables, a Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 with Hue apps, the correct amount of power cords, and internet access via either the venue wifi (very slow) or via the phone's wifi hotspot mode (pretty zippy, by comparison).

We were idiots and thought that we could just plug the hub into the router and have it work normally without internet (assuming the router/hub combo would allow the wifi/zigbee magic to flow), but didn't test it beforehand. So... It doesn't work. If any of you have suggestions of how we might get control of our lights with what we have on hand, please let me know.

It looks like this post has a partial solution, but it's a bit too technical for me to parse. If it seems like it might be workable and anyone could direct me to info about that process that's a little bit more novice friendly, I'd love it.

Thanks in advance!

posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear to Technology (2 answers total)

What you want to do is get your laptop to connect to a wifi connection (either phone or venue -- I doubt speed will matter much for this purpose), and then share that connection with devices plugged into your laptop's ethernet port. How you'll accomplish that depends on your operating system, but this looks like a decent guide if you're using Windows 7.

Good luck, and congratulations!
posted by nixxon at 2:34 PM on July 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Ok, disaster averted. It turns out that it does work the way I was envisioning, the problem is that I was trying to control the lights via tablet with the tablet connected to my phone's wifi hotspot. As soon as I connected the tablet to the router's wifi signal, I lost internet access but the Hue apps started working fine, which makes perfect sense in retrospect.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 3:27 PM on July 26, 2014 [1 favorite]