Using a Sound Sensor With a Raspberry Pi to Control Your Philips Hue Lights

Use case: once my kitchen door is closed I'm not able to hear my doorbell - annoying when you throw a party with many guests!

Luckily, one guy at the partycame up with the excellent idea to "hook up some kind of microphone and ring a sound if the doorell rings".

The idea seemed nice, so we brainstormed the possiblities over a couple of beers with my tech-savy friends.
It hat to be a bit more flashy than just a doorbell sound, so instead of using my speakers we decided to use my Philips Hue lights instead to create a cool light effect to announce new guests!

All of the lights were set up in the kitchen already, so we went for a blink the lights if the doorbell rings approach.

Step 1: Hardware Requirements

a Raspberry Pi 2 to run the software / scripts (every Raspberry generation should be feasible to implement this)
a cheap sound sensor for a couple of bucks from ebay/amazon/etc - e.g. here or here
some female-to-femalejumper wires to connect the sound sensor with the Pi
Philipps Hue lights, you can go for every set up you want - I went for
- Philips Friends of hue - LivingColors Bloom
- Philips Hue Go
- Philips hue - LED
- one of the above needs to be the starter kit / you will need a bridge to control the lights after all

Step 2: Software Requirements

In my setup I used a Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian Wheezy with a few python libraries:

Raspbian
Python package python-dev
Python library requests
Python library qhue from Quentin Stafford-Fraser
Python library RPI.GPIO

Step 3: Initial Setup

This will outline the main steps of the set up, as you can see it's pretty simple and should be straight-forward to understand.

Connect the sound sensor to the Raspberry Pi via female-to-female jumpers, using 3 jumpers for:
- VCC (white cable, Physical Pin 2)
- GND (black cable, Physical Pin 6)
- D0 (grey cable, I used the Physical pin 7 to connect the sensor)
  Check out this tutorial for better pictures (note they use pin #12 instead of #7 in their tutorial)
power on your Raspberry Pi
- If your sound sensor has indicator LEDs, make sure it triggers when creating noise to test the basic sound sensor capabilities
install Raspbian image (if not done already)
setup up and connect via ssh
install necessary software (python-dev) via

apt-get install python-dev
and install the python libraries requests, qhue and RPI.GPIO via

pip install requests
git clone https://github.com/quentinsf/qhue/
cd qhue
pip install RPI.GPIO

Step 4: Set Up the Script

Let's open a new script named sensor.py and put in the below code.

nano sensor.py

Content:

import time
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
from qhue import Bridge
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) # use board pin numbers
# define pin #7 as input pin
pin = 7
GPIO.setup(pin, GPIO.IN) 
b = Bridge("192.168.1.30", 'e254339152304b714add57d14a8fdbb')
groups = b.groups	# as groups are handy, I will contorll all
while 1:
  if GPIO.input(pin) == GPIO.LOW:
	i = 3 # number of iterations
	for l in range(1,i+1):
		# this is one of the temporary effects, see official docs
		# at http://www.developers.meethue.com/documentation/core-concepts
		b.groups[0].action(alert="select") #group 0 = all lights
		time.sleep(1)
	time.sleep(10)

Step 5: Fire It Up!

Just run the script via

sudo python sensor.py

And trigger the sound input - if all went well, your lights should blink 3 times..

Congratulations, you just created a listener script to listen to your doorbell / any sound you wish!

Step 6: Set Up Autostart for Your Listener Script

We will be utilizing the Linux rc.local functionality and create a new shell script that will run the python part we just created in the previous step:

nano /home/pi/qhue/sensor.sh

Content:

#!/bin/sh<br># sensor.sh

sudo python /home/pi/qhue/sensor.py

Now make this script executable by performing:

chmod +x sensor.sh

Open up the /etc/rc.local file

nano /etc/rc.local

and enter the following line before exit 0 to run the script at startup

sudo /home/pi/qhue/sensor.sh

Save the file and reboot your Raspberry Pi via

sudo shutdown -r now

Step 7: Summary / To-Do

This instructable outlines the very basics, I will add a few pictures and more details once I got the time to fine-tune this.

It is worth noticing that the distance to your sound source shouldn't be too far away, neither should you place the Pi in a spot where you would expect regular noise.

Hope you enjoyed the guide, any suggestions? Feel free to comment ;)

Cheers

Introduction: Using a Sound Sensor With a Raspberry Pi to Control Your Philips Hue Lights