One of our upcoming hardware projects (more on this later) requires a very bright, controllable light source. In the past, we’ve just used bare LEDs with our own cooling, power, control, etc. Not being someone who really understands how electricity works though, it always feels like a hassle to get a reliable setup. For this project, we instead decided to just give a LumeCube a try. They’re far from cheap, but they’re very bright, and hopefully have rock solid reliability.
LumeCube has an iOS app which allows for control over bluetooth. Although it also has a USB port, that’s only used for charging. We wanted to be able to do basic brightness control from within the Python application that will run the rest of the hardware. It doesn’t appear anyone has gone to the trouble of reverse engineering the LumeCube before, so we figured we’d give it a go. There were just two challenges:
Sticking with our philosophy of obtaining minimum-viable-knowledge, we started Googling “how to reverse engineer a bluetooth device” and ended up on this Medium