Ken Kyger loved the super customizable Philips Hue bulbs, but he was unimpressed by the lack of a public API. He quickly went to work creating an SDK, which he released on his Github repository. With the SDK completed, he was able to build a few more apps, and even experimented with GPS – but it was never accurate enough for a room-to-room based system.
In early 2014, one the developers at Echo showed Ken his new Estimote Beacons – it was love at first sight. Ken made some proof of concepts at work. He had a basic idea of what was needed to manage them and understood early on that these beacons were going to be the perfect addition to his home automation system. Once he had the initial idea planned out, it took Ken less than three hours to build the app demonstrated in the video below. He admits the code was rough, but decided to publish it on Github the same evening.
Since then, Ken has spent a bit of time cleaning up the code and adding some basic UI elements, but he hasn't yet been able to devote a big chunk of time to it. Ken's app monitors Estimote Beacons for enter/exit region callbacks, but he also wants it to trigger an off command at a user specified distance and to dim the lights based on the user’s proximity. He hopes to implement these in the next iteration.
We encourage you to take a look at some of Ken's other work. Google r2doesinc, follow him on Twitter, and check out some of his other open source projects.