You purchased a Philips TV powered by their Ambilight tech which beams the TV image colours all around with its built in back leds, and even better you enjoyed the Hue Sync capability which brought to life your whole living room with all colours in sync with the image on TV, it was awesome.

Why am I using the past tense? Because you do not want it on at all times, typically during day time you would turn it off, and you noticed that after a certain sequence of on/off it starts to act strange.

🚨 Lights in the room stop syncing at the expected speed of the TV and go way slower than they should.

This happens because every time the Ambilight+Hue option is turned on the TV is going to create a new  Entertainment area in your Hue Hub, you can see them using the Philips mobile app. When these cloned areas become more than 20 they start to slow down the Hub and the Sync with the mapped lights does not get activated altogether.

The only known “fix” for this was to go into the app and to manually delete all these unused/useless configs one by one, every single time.

Ambilight+Hue Creating new Entertainment Areas every time i start the TV
byu/Dokayn inHue

Ambilight+hue not working and creating entertainment areas in Hue app every time TV is turned on
byu/KasAppeal inHue

The company does know about this issue, but apparently despite being both under the “Philips” flag, the TV and Hue productions line regard themselves as frienemies and cannot even talk among themselves to sort this out, as per the baffling response i got from them on twitter.

There are developer APIs available that allow to automate this repetitive task to keep things running as they should, instead of doing it manually every time the problem presents itself.

In short, what this app does is :

1. Provide a succint UI to enter the IP of your Hue Hub
2. Fetch and save the API key necessary to make the next calls to the hub
3. List all the Entertainment Areas on the hub
4. Loop trough them, and delete all the not running ones that match the name used by the Philips TV to make them
5. Repeat periodically every 2h
6. Autostart with OS, so its always there working

You can install the app for:

• Mac 🍏
• Windows 🪟

For it to work, the computer you will be installing and running it on must be on the same network of the Hue Hub so it can reach it, meaning both are connected to the same WiFi/router and not using VPNs.

You can check the source repo on Github:

https://github.com/srescio/hue-cleaner

There is a known issue about tauri apps being flagged as malware  Trojan:Script/Wacatac.B!ml by Windows Defender, its a false positive:

tauri-apps/tauri#2486

To get around it after install go into Windows Defender, which will have already quarantined the installed app and allow it as exception.

What happened to my Twitter account?

I have attached screenshots of the conversation with Philips Hue because I closed my Twitter account and my Tweets have become inaccessible (link to the original thread if you are curious).

You read that right, Twitter, not X, because I signed up to a social network that was normal a decade ago, not to a Nazi-fascist platform presided over and owned by a billionaire with delusions of omnipotence, which is why I abandoned that platform, you can instead find me on Mastodon and Bluesky.

https://sresc.io/1QWX