Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I found a major lack of documentation for Device::Hue, and chatGPT had some information that I would describe as whimsically wrong.

Here’s what I ended up doing to get a working perl setup controlling my hue lights:

1) Put a valid URL in /etc/environment for the key HUE_BRIDGE
2) Put a key in /etc/environment for the key HUE_KEY
3) The following code sets lights 17 and 19 to red:

my $bridge = Device::Hue->new();

$bridge->config();

foreach $light_id (17, 19) {

   my $light = $bridge->light($light_id);

   $light->set_state( { hue => 0, sat => 254 });

   $light->commit();

}

Just a heads up that hopefully google will index and save someone else from the several hours of digging I’ve just had to do. the perl module IPC::Shareable sets SIG{CHLD} to ignore any time you include it. You can set it back to the default behavior, but until you do, waitpid() is going to return -1 and $? will contain -1 for any pid-waiting you do.

I had a couple of notes on using Net::Bluetooth from a raspberry pi to talk to a Bluetooth serial port because I couldn’t get the example code given with Net::Bluetooth to work.

The following will connect to a mac address and send and receive data from it (in this particular example, a ESP32):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Net::Bluetooth;

use Data::Dumper;

use IO::Handle;

my $obj = Net::Bluetooth->newsocket(“RFCOMM”);
$addr = ‘C4:4F:33:58:B6:FB’;

$port = 1;
if($obj->connect($addr, $port) != 0) {

     die “connect error: $!\n”;

}
my $fh = $obj->perlfh();

$fh->autoflush(1);
sleep(1);
print “sending \n”;
print $fh “V\n”;

print “receiving\n”;
$buf = readline($fh);

print “Fetchhost: $buf\n”;

I use this a lot when writing a simple perl script that I want to take args like –flag and –database=this and –comment=”This is a comment with spaces”

while($arg = shift) { 
        if(($s1,$s2) = $arg =~ /–(.*)=(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $s2 = $a if(($a) = $s2 =~ /^\”(.*)\”$/);

                $arg{$l1} = $s2;

        } elsif(($s1) = $arg =~ /–(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $arg{$l1} = 1;

        }

}

Stick it in the top of the script, and you can then just use

if($arg{‘flag’}) {

}

$comment = $arg{‘comment’};

and so on and so forth.