BusyLight for Humans™ gives you control of USB attached LED lights from a variety of vendors. Lights can be controlled via the command-line, using a HTTP API or imported directly into your own python project.

Six Lights Attached to One Host
Back to Front, Left to Right
BlyncLight, BlyncLight Plus, Busylight
Blink(1), Flag, BlinkStick

• Control lights from the command-line.
• Control lights via a Web API.
• Import busylight into your own project.
• Supports six vendors & multiple models:
  • Agile Innovative BlinkStick
  • Embrava Blynclight
  • Kuando BusyLight
  • Luxafor Flag
  • Plantronics Status Indicator
  • ThingM Blink1
• Supported on MacOS and Linux
• Windows support will be available in the near future.

If you have a USB light that's not on this list open an issue with the make and model device you want supported, where I can get one, and any public hardware documentation you are aware of.

Thank you to @todbot and the very nice people at ThingM who graciously and unexpectedly gifted me with two blink(1) mk3 lights!

Installs only the command-line busylight tool and associated modules.

$ python3 -m pip install busylight-for-humans 

Installs uvicorn and FastAPI in addition to busylight:

$ python3 -m pip install busylight-for-humans[webapi]

Linux controls access to USB devices via the udev subsystem. By default it denies non-root users access to devices it doesn't recognize. I've got you covered!

You'll need root access to configure the udev rules:

$ busylight udev-rules -o 99-busylights.rules
$ sudo cp 99-busylights.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
$ sudo udevadm control -R
$ # unplug/plug your light
$ busylight on

$ busylight on               # light turns on green
$ busylight on red           # now it's shining a friendly red
$ busylight on 0xff0000      # still red
$ busylight on #00ff00       # now it's blue!
$ busylight blink            # it's slowly blinking on and off with a red color
$ busylight blink green fast # blinking faster green and off
$ busylight --all on         # turn all lights on green
$ busylight --all off        # turn all lights off

First start the busylight API server:

$ busylight serve
INFO:     Started server process [20189]
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
INFO:     Application startup complete.
INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8888 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

The API is fully documented and available @ https://localhost:8888/redoc

Now you can use the web API endpoints which return JSON payloads:

  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/lights
  ...
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/light/0/on | jq
  {
    "light_id": 0,
    "action": "on",
    "color": "green"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/light/0/off | jq
  {
    "light_id": 0,
    "action": "off"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/light/0/on/purple | jq
  {
    "light_id": 0,
    "action": "on",
    "color": "purple"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/light/0/off | jq
  {
    "light_id": 0,
    "action": "off"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/lights/on | jq
  {
    "light_id": "all",
    "action": "on",
    "color": "green"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/lights/off | jq
  {
    "light_id": "all",
    "action": "off"
  }
  $ curl -s http://localhost:8888/lights/rainbow | jq
  {
    "light_id": "all",
    "action": "effect",
    "name": "rainbow"
  }

The API can be secured with a simple username and password through HTTP Basic Authentication. To require authentication for all API requests, set the BUSYLIGHT_API_USER and BUSYLIGHT_API_PASS environmental variables before running busylight serve.

⚠️ SECURITY WARNING: HTTP Basic Auth sends usernames and passwords in cleartext (i.e., unencrypted). Use of SSL is highly recommended!

Adding light support to your own python applications is easy!

In this example, we pick an Embrava Blynclight to activate with the color white.

from busylight.lights.embrava import Blynclight

light = Blynclight.first_light()

light.on((255, 255, 255))

The busylight package includes a manager class that's great for working with multiple lights or lights that require a little more direct intervention like the Kuando Busylight series.

from busylight.manager import LightManager, ALL_LIGHTS
from busylight.effects import rainbow

manager = LightManager()
for light in manager.lights:
   print(light.name)

manager.apply_effect_to_light(ALL_LIGHTS, rainbow)
...
manager.lights_off(ALL_LIGHTS)