Hue app: gotta be a way to do this, but I don’t see it

October 10, 2018 6:18 PM

I have a few Hue bulbs plus a Go, but I can’t see how —with the Hue app—to make a light fade back and forth between 2 diff colors. Is this such a wild thing to want to do?
posted by disnchntd to Technology (3 answers total)

I've got Hue, and there's no way to do flashy stuff in the app that I know of. My partner wrote a python script that we could do flashy things with, and I'm sure there's a 3rd party app out there but it doesn't seem to do it natively.
posted by cholly at 8:54 PM on October 10, 2018

I don't think it's a wild thing to want to do, and there are definitely apps that can do that, such as Hue Disco.

I think the reason the Hue app doesn't do it natively is because it's sort of an inelegant thing to do. The app has to constantly send the changes to the lights: They don't really have the brains on board to be told "do this thing on your own." So you're sorta stuck with a situation where something has to sit there telling the lights what to do over and over and over and over until you decide they can stop.

Not sure how much better background apps work these days on iOS, but when I was goofing around with this sort of thing a few years ago you had to pretty much keep the app on and in the foreground the entire time you wanted the effect, which gave me the impression the app is pretty involved with making sure everything happens.
posted by mph at 9:42 PM on October 10, 2018

I use Hue Pro on android to do this, which works out pretty well for me. As mentioned above, the stock app does not do this sort of thing, as a general rule.
posted by jaymzjulian at 5:29 PM on October 11, 2018