XLED - unofficial control Twinkly - Smart Decoration LED lights
XLED is python library and command line interface (CLI) to control Twinkly. Creators describe Twinkly project page of Kickstarter:
Twinkly is a Christmas tree light string, controlled via smartphone: "internet of things" meets extraordinary light effects! Created by ledworks
Library and CLI are free software available under MIT license.
Documentation for library can be found on https://xled.readthedocs.io.
Use of library:
>>> import xled
>>> discovered_device = xled.discover.discover()
>>> discovered_device.name
'Twinkly_33AAFF'
>>> control = xled.ControlInterface(discovered_device.ip_address, discovered_device.hw_address)
>>> control.set_mode('movie')
>>> control.get_mode()['mode']
u'movie'
>>> control.get_device_info()['number_of_led']
105Use of CLI:
$ xled on
Looking for any device...
Working on device: Twinkly_33AAFF
Turned on.Unofficial documentation of private protocol and API is available online.
Why?
I have Twinkly 105 LEDs starter light set. That is latest available model in 2017: TW105S-EU. As of December 2017 there are only two ways to control lights - mobile app on Android or iOS or hardware button on the cord.
Android application didn't work as advertised on my Xiaomi Redmi 3S phone. On first start it connected and disconnected in very fast pace (like every 1-2 seconds) to the hardware. I wasn't able to control anything at all. Later I wanted to connect it to my local WiFi network. But popup dialog that shouldn't have appear never did so.
Public API was promised around Christmas 2016 for next season. Later update from October 2016 it seems API won't be available any time soon:
API for external control are on our dev check list, we definitely need some feedback from the community to understand which could be a proper core set to start with.
It turned out that application uses HTTP to control lights. I ended up with capturing network traffic and documented this private API. In the end I'm able to configure the device pretty easilly.
Credits
This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.