Home can i do anything useful with philips hue without ethernet?

[madeirabhoy]

have a lot of Philips hue stuff and it works great through the bridge plugged into my router. however i want to give a spare hue go lamp to a friend who only has internet through a 4g portable internet box, which only works through wifi.

so im guessing the bridge only works through ethernet?

is there any way of using my imac, as in plug the bridge into my mac and use my mac's wifi?

without the bridge, did I read somewhere right, can you use the dimmer remotes directly with it and would that change the colours of the hue go? how do you even set it up?

any advice welcome.

 

[waw74]

if you don't have the bridge, there's no way to talk to the lamp
I'm not sure about using a dimmer and lamp without a bridge, but at the very least, I'm guessing, you'd need a bridge to set it up. If you've already got dimmers, lamp, and the bridge working at your place, try it out by unplugging the bridge.


The very newest hue lamps (within a year or so) also support bluetooth control without a bridge, so they'll talk directly to your phone. You'll have to investigate which ones, They did modify some existing products, and release them as a new version of the same product name. I don't know how to tell the difference.
I also don't know if the dimmers were updated with bluetooth or not.
it's not a feature I need, so didn't really investigate.

if your friend has an appleTV, the bluetooth versions will talk to that if the phones not around,

Also, an old airport express can join a wifi network, and then you can use it's ethernet port to connect other devices.
There are several options for doing this besides an airport express.
Just saw your Mac question, yes, you can share the connection using that, Go into system preferences -> sharing (a folder with a yellow diamond road sign), then go to internet sharing, it should be self explanatory from there.

 

[madeirabhoy]

if you don't have the bridge, there's no way to talk to the lamp
I'm not sure about using a dimmer and lamp without a bridge, but at the very least, I'm guessing, you'd need a bridge to set it up. If you've already got dimmers, lamp, and the bridge working at your place, try it out by unplugging the bridge.


The very newest hue lamps (within a year or so) also support bluetooth control without a bridge, so they'll talk directly to your phone. You'll have to investigate which ones, They did modify some existing products, and release them as a new version of the same product name. I don't know how to tell the difference.
I also don't know if the dimmers were updated with bluetooth or not.
it's not a feature I need, so didn't really investigate.

if your friend has an appleTV, the bluetooth versions will talk to that if the phones not around,

Also, an old airport express can join a wifi network, and then you can use it's ethernet port to connect other devices.
There are several options for doing this besides an airport express.
Just saw your Mac question, yes, you can share the connection using that, Go into system preferences -> sharing (a folder with a yellow diamond road sign), then go to internet sharing, it should be self explanatory from there.

thanks, very informative answer. guess idea is to pick up a second hand bridge from ebay and try plugging it into imac.