Hacking Hue Lightbulbs

What do you do with a Hue smart lightbulb? Well, if you are [Chris Greening], you take it apart and get hacking. If you ever wondered what’s inside, the teardown is pretty good, and you can also watch the video below. The potting compound, however, makes a mess.

Once you get the potting undone, there are three PCBs: an LED carrier, a power supply, and a logic board. The arrangement of the LEDs is a bit confusing, but [Chris] explains it along with providing schematics for all of the boards.

The odd LED arrangement allows the logic board to short out banks of LEDs. The next step was to hijack the RGB signals to allow an external microcontroller to take charge of the bulb. One LED driver chip drives everything. Shorting out banks with a cheap MOSFET allows one chip to drive the LEDs in multiple colors.

This is an interesting look inside a production smart bulb. We aren’t sure we’d really want to reuse one of these, but maybe if you had a bad power board, it would be better than trashing the relatively expensive bulbs.

We’ve seen other lights hacked to work with Hue. You can even hack together your own bridge if you like.