I recently added a Philips hue Lightstrip to my hue collection with a specific intent. My son has started a twitch channel (please follow) and I wanted way to know when he is online using the Lightstrip so not to enter the room he streams from as I’d be in the camera shot and at the age of 14 your dad in your stream is no a good thing, apparently.

I came up with the following idea. Lights are green when he is on the computer but go red when he streams. So how do you make this happen.

Firstly I checked out IFTT but its just not good enough, sure you can change the light the you start streaming but there is nothing to change back the you stop streaming.

The answer was an addition to my Home Assistant instance.

Once twitch is configured in HA a simple automation can monitor the status of stream and change the lights from green to red and then red to green.

Next thought was turning the lights on and off and to do this called for using the Hue API. This is fairly easy to construct once you have your API key. Hue have a really simple guide on how to do this and also find the ID of the lights on your network you want to control.

So once we have our API key and the ID of our lights we can make a Powershell script to run on the PC used for twitch streaming as below:

$apicontent= '{"on":true, "sat":254, "bri":254,"hue":25535}'
Invoke-WebRequest -Method put -Uri http://192.168.X.XX/api/YOURAPIKEY/lights/10/state -Body $apicontent -UseBasicParsing

The first line controls the lights, "on":true turns the light on following three parts set the lights temperature, brightness and colour, 25535 is green.

The second line does the web request and is were is you add your huebase station IP address, your api key and the light device ID, in this example it’s 10.

So now we can add this to our PC as .ps1 file I called mine hueon.ps1 and dropped it directly in C:/ root.
Next we need to create a batch file to call the powershell script as below:

@ECHO OFF
PowerShell.exe -Command "C:/hueon.ps1"

This can be saved anywhere you want I called mine hueon.bat and saved to my documents folder. If you run this your lights should come on. If they don’t check your the path is correct to the .ps1 and the API call is correct.

Now we need to call the batch file at logon to do that in the Windows search bar type run and then open gpedit.msc and go to:
User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Scripts -> Logon -> Properties -> Add

Select you .bat file and you are done. When the PC logs in, the .bat will run the Powershell script and on come the lights.

If you want the lights to go off when you logout/shutdown your PC just repeat creating a .ps1 & .bat but change "on":true to "on":false in your API call and in gpedit.msc select logout and then you batch file.

So now we have:
PC boots and logs in lights come on and go green
If a twitch stream is started they go red
When the stream is stopped they go green
When the PC  is logged out or shutdown they go off