๐ก HueControl
The Windows Control Centre for Your Philips Hue Lights
A native desktop app for managing lights, rooms, scenes, sensors and switches, talking straight to your bridge on the local network.
๐ฏ What HueControl Is
Philips Hue has apps for phones, tablets and voice assistants. It has never had a proper Windows desktop application. If you sit at a PC all day, controlling the lights in the room you are sitting in means picking up your phone.
HueControl fills that gap. It is a native Windows application that connects directly to your Hue bridge over the local network and gives you everything in one window: every light, room, zone and scene, plus the sensors, plugs and switches that the simpler desktop tools ignore.
It goes past on and off. You can add and remove devices, rename them, create and edit rooms, zones and scenes, program what a dimmer switch does, check accessory battery levels, and manage several bridges grouped into homes with instant switching between them.
๐ฅ Who It Is For
- Windows users with Hue lights: anyone who works at a desk and would rather change the lighting from the keyboard than from a phone.
- People with large installations: multiple rooms, zones, sensors and switches across more than one bridge, all in a single window.
- Privacy-minded households: the application talks only to the bridge on your own network; there is no cloud account and no telemetry.
- Home automation enthusiasts: device management and switch programming that the official mobile app makes fiddly or hides.
- Developers: a clean, dependency-free WPF and MVVM codebase, published under GPL-3.0 and open to read and modify.
โก What It Does
๐๏ธ Lights and Rooms
Per-light and per-room on/off with synchronised brightness sliders. Everything is grouped by room and by device type, so a large installation stays readable.
๐จ Colour and Temperature
A colour picker with proper conversion between the picker, the Hue colour space and colour temperature, so what you choose on screen is what the lamp produces.
โ Device Management
Search for and add new lights, plugs, motion sensors, dimmer switches and buttons; rename them; remove the ones you no longer own. Full management, not just control.
๐ Switch Programming
Bind a dimmer switch to a room so its ON button recalls that room's scene, and see accessory battery level and last activity at a glance.
๐ Scenes and Zones
Create, rename and delete rooms, zones and scenes, with built-in Hue presets such as Relax, Concentrate, Energize and Savanna Sunset, shown with rendered colour previews.
๐ Multiple Bridges
Group several bridges into homes and switch between them instantly. Discovery runs through the Hue discovery service and falls back to manual IP entry when the network blocks it.
๐ Local Network Only
The app speaks directly to the bridge REST API on your LAN. Bridge details are stored in your own Windows profile and nothing is sent anywhere else.
๐ Ten Languages
The interface ships in ten languages, including Arabic and Hebrew with full right-to-left layout, and switches language live without a restart.
๐ Dark and Light Themes
A custom borderless window with swappable dark and light palettes, so the app fits whichever way you run Windows.
๐ง Problems It Solves
- No official Windows app: the gap this product exists to fill; Hue ships mobile and voice, not desktop.
- Reaching for the phone: changing the lights while working should not require a second device.
- Control-only desktop tools: most third-party utilities toggle lights; this one adds, removes, renames and configures them.
- Switch configuration: programming what a dimmer button does is buried in the mobile app and straightforward here.
- More than one bridge: large or multi-building installations are handled as homes with instant switching.
- Cloud dependence: the lights are on your network, so the control app should work on your network too.
๐ก๏ธ Privacy and Data
The design principle is simple: your lighting is a local system, so the software that controls it should behave like one.
- All communication goes to the Hue bridge on your local network over its REST API.
- No account, no sign-in and no cloud service operated by us.
- Bridge connection details are stored locally in your Windows user profile.
- No analytics, tracking or telemetry of any kind is collected.
- The Hue discovery service is contacted only to locate a bridge, and manual IP entry is available if you would rather it were not.
- The full source is public under GPL-3.0, so every one of these claims can be checked.
๐ Languages and Accessibility
The interface is fully translated, not partially localized, and the layout adapts to the language rather than assuming left-to-right text.
- English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Russian.
- Arabic and Hebrew with full right-to-left layout flipping.
- Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
- Language switches live, with no application restart.
- Every interface string is translated, not just the main screens.
๐ ๏ธ Technology Stack
Platform
C# on .NET 9, targeting Windows 10 and 11 as a desktop application.
User Interface
WPF with a custom borderless window chrome and swappable dark and light theme resource dictionaries.
Architecture
Hand-rolled MVVM: observable objects, sync and async relay commands, debouncing for slider input, and grouped collections.
Bridge Integration
Philips Hue local bridge REST API, including HTTPS bridges that present the Hue Bridge root certificate on the LAN.
Dependencies
Zero third-party NuGet packages. The application is built entirely on the .NET base class library and WPF.
Localization
A custom string catalogue covering the whole interface in ten languages, with flow direction flipping for right-to-left locales.
Testing
xUnit suite with a stubbed HTTP handler for offline runs, plus opt-in tests that exercise a real bridge.
Licence
Free and open source under GPL-3.0, with the full source available on GitHub.
๐ Requirements
- Windows 10 or Windows 11.
- A Philips Hue bridge on the same local network.
- The .NET 9 Desktop Runtime, or a self-contained build that bundles it.
- Physical access to the bridge button once, to authorise the app on first connection.
Try HueControl
The application is complete and open source. Read the code, build it yourself, or get in touch if you would like a packaged build or a change made for your installation.
HueControl is an independent application and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Signify N.V. or Philips. "Philips Hue" is a trademark of Signify Holding.