The Hue starter kit came yesterday and we excitedly set it up. The base station requires a wired connection to the rest of the network which made us realize that all of our devices have been wireless up until now. Our wireless router is mounted on the ceiling for the best range and only has a single cable going to it which carries power over ethernet and a connection to our modem. Everything else hsa been wireless. Rather than mount more things on the ceiling and run more cables up for power we decided to duct tape together a solution involving a second wireless router. This brings us to a total of three – the first router that provides DHCP address, the ceiling mounted router that provides wireless, and the Hue base station that provides wireless to the light bulbs.

I did learn one cool thing through all of this. The Hue light bulbs create a mesh network in addition to talking directly to the base station. So if I try to install a light that is out of range, the answer is add more lights, a strangely pleasing solution.