Turtles: A Holiday Side Project for Smart Lighting Control

The author, joisig, shares his experience of creating a home project dubbed 'Turtles' during the 2023 holiday season. The project is tailored for individuals with lights controlled by Shelly dimmers or through a Philips Hue bridge. Turtles is described as a reasonably simple setup with a small and understandable codebase, making it an easy hack for those who enjoy DIY solutions, though it has limited functionality compared to platforms like Home Assistant. After a recent home renovation that included various smart lights, the itch to control them from a single interface sparked the creation of Turtles. The project leveraged Elixir, Erlang, and JavaScript, with Elixir as the main programming language. The process involved setting static IPs for Shelly lights, documenting desired light control configurations, and running the local system via development mode on Elixir. Turtles also necessitated handling of unexpected issues, such as an incorrect product shipment and the discovery of the Philips Hue bridge's irregular MAC address changes. Despite these challenges, the author successfully implemented SSDP discovery and shared the source code for Turtles on GitHub, inviting others to try it out. The project is run in development mode and can be executed from a dedicated Linux machine within a home network. The article concludes with screenshots of the User Interface (UI) for Turtles, showcasing the features of controlling lights and creating scenes.