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Finding Philips Hue bridge on network

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sqmk edited this page Apr 16, 2013 · 9 revisions

My preferred method of finding the bridge for the Philips Hue is by ping scanning the network, and then arp lookup. Since I'm a Debian user, here's how I do it in terminal using nmap and arp lookup:

# Replace 10.0.1.255 with your network broadcast ip
$ nmap -sP 10.0.1.255/24 > /dev/null; sudo arp -na | grep "at 00:17:88"

If you are an OSX user, this may help in pulling the proper machines:

$ ping 255.255.255.255
$ arp -na | grep "at 0:17:88"

Both of these will look up any devices on the network matching the "Philips Lighting BV" vendor specific MAC segment.

If there are any bridges found on your network, your results may look like this:

? (10.0.1.31) at 0:17:88:9:73:d2 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]

Testing the bridge's web server

From here, you can test the devices built-in web server by requesting document from that address:

$ curl 10.0.1.31

You should get a response similar to this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-type: text/html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-W3CDTD HTML 4.0 TransitionalEN">
<html>
<head>
    <title>hue personal wireless lighting</title>
    <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.meethue.com">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Finally

Now that you have found the bridge and it's MAC address, you may want to make a DHCP reservation on your network for the device.

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