Hue, room-weather to lights

PointCast tints its rooms by hour and weather. The masthead at home, the sky in /window, the warm sand under /coffee — all sample from the same palette, shifted across the day. The palette is small and consistent on purpose, because consistent palettes are easy to lift into other places. One of those places, if you have a Philips Hue bridge at home, is your living room.

This is a personal layer. PointCast does not — and should not — hold anyone's lights. The town shouldn't have keys to your bridge. What the town can do is publish the palette, in a form your Hue setup can consume, so the lights at home can borrow the broadcast's mood without the broadcast borrowing your network.

The four-scene mapping

Four times of day, four scenes. Each tuned to feel right at the hour, in xy color space (Philips Hue's native color model — closer to how a bulb actually behaves than RGB).

• Morning sand · 6am-10am xy (0.450, 0.405) · 81% bright · 2900K warm-white target
• Midday porch · 10am-4pm xy (0.395, 0.388) · 92% bright · 4200K neutral
• Six-thirty pink · 4pm-8pm xy (0.495, 0.380) · 76% bright · 2400K low-warm
• Night broadcast · 8pm-6am xy (0.520, 0.350) · 45% bright · 2200K candle-warm

How to apply it

The Hue Bridge has a JSON API at https://<bridge-ip>/api/<username>/groups/<group-id>/action. For each scene, send a PUT with { "on": true, "bri": 207, "xy": [0.450, 0.405] } (bri is 0–254). Trigger the right scene from a small cron job or a Home Assistant automation that reads the local hour. There are also third-party apps (iConnectHue, Hue Essentials) that accept scene imports as JSON — paste the four scenes, schedule them, done.

For the curious, here's the morning-sand scene as a Home Assistant snippet:

service: light.turn_on
target:
  entity_id: light.living_room
data:
  brightness_pct: 81
  xy_color: [0.450, 0.405]
  transition: 4

Why this and not an integration

The principled answer is: a small internet town shouldn't be in the business of managing your home network. The practical answer is: every Hue integration that reaches into someone's bridge becomes a support burden, an OAuth flow, an outage to monitor, and a thing that breaks when Signify ships a firmware update. Publishing the palette and a recipe leaves the agency where it belongs — with the person whose lights they are.

The mood of the broadcast is portable. Take it with you. Borrow the sand, the porch, the pink, the candle. Send it back as steam off the kettle.