Controlling Hue Lights within Max4Live

Hello there,

I am trying to control hue lights from within ableton using max. I have two problems which I have been banging my head against the wall with and probably have a relatively simple solution, deperately hoping for help.

1. I am unable to turn my phillips hue lights on and off with maxURL. I can change their hue, saturation and brightness, but on/off evades me.

using hue’s debugging tool, I can send a message body of {“on”: false} and turn the light off: 

        ######### data using hue’s api debugger ########

http://<bridgeIP>/debug/clip.html

          url: http://10.0.0.10/api/m8y55VjOm9bplHxe01XfXq9aEm6deC-0SLpTUy2U/lights/2/state

          message body: {"on": false}  (or true, to turn them on, works fine)

       ##############################################

within ableton I’ve used the following dict @embed successfully to adjust the light, but not to turn it on or off:

{ "http_method”: “put”,

“url”: “ http://10.0.0.10/api/m8y55VjOm9bplHxe01XfXq9aEm6deC-0SLpTUy2U/lights/2/state”,

“post_data”: {

“sat”: 201,

”bri” : 500,

“hue”: 20000

}

}

I thought I could set post_data to contain “on”: false, to turn the light off but I get an error

Things I’ve noticed: the max editor changes false to 0, it doesn’t help to put false in quotes, but I don’t know why this isn’t working.

2. My second problem is that I’d like to create knobs/sliders to control the lights from within ableton and I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it. I know how to create a slider/knob and have it effect values in an dict using dict.pack and triggers, but how to get the knob/value changes to push/live stream to the url as post_data evades me.  For a working static change I use a bang connected to the above dict @embed connected to maxurl, but I’m not clear on how to get live adjustments pushed.

I’d appreciate any help that you can give me. If I can’t get this to work by the end of the weekend then I’ll be stuck using an app on my iPhone/iPad to control the lights, which will work, but means juggling another interface instead of being able to simply work within ableton. 

MANY thanks from

a real noob!

lysha