There is an increasing trend of using new wireless light bulbs for home appliances. There are many light bulbs available that use Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth 4.0, and other home automation protocols. Some of the light bulbs only allow remote switching on and switching off; some allow remote dimming of the light intensity of the bulb. New LED Light Bulbs also allow you to set the color of the light bulb by sending the RGB value to the light bulbs.
One of the most popular wireless light bulb systems is Philips Hue. The Philips Hue system includes a bridge and remote led bulbs. The Philips Hue bridge connects with a home network to allow the user to manage light bulbs via a local network connection. Philips Hue bulbs use the Zigbee Light Link protocol, and the Philips Hue bridge controls the bulbs.
Philips provides software development kits for users to access the bridge and control light bulbs with REST API. Official SDKs and tools are provided for iOS, OS X, and Java platforms, but third-party developers ported SDK for many other platforms such as Node.js, ActionScript, Bash Script, Qt, C++, C#, Go, Perl, PHP, Python, and so on.
Note
You can access the Philips Hue developer website at the following link: http://www.developers.meethue.com/.
The Intel Galileo Linux image that we have created does support Node.js, Python, Bash Scripts, and so you can pick any of them to start developing an application for Philips Hue on your Intel Galileo.