Taskbulb

A small Rust application for controlling a smart light through a Home Assistant instance from a Windows taskbar notification-area (system tray) icon

Taskbulb is designed to control a room's light without popups or web technologies, keeping the experience unintrusive

A screenshot:

Requirements

• A running Home Assistant instance with a light entity
• The Rust toolchain, including Cargo
• Windows for the full feature set, including the taskbar controls and global mouse-wheel shortcuts. (basic toggling is the only fully cross platform feature)

Building

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/BenMcAvoy/Taskbulb.git
   cd Taskbulb
   

2. Build the release executable:

   cargo build --release -j 4
   

   The executable will be created at ./target/release/taskbulb.exe on Windows. The file extension is platform-dependent

Configuration

1. Copy .env.example to .env

2. Fill in the following values:

   Variable	Description
   HA_BASE_URL	The base URL of your Home Assistant instance, without a trailing slash (for example, http://homeassistant.local:8123)
   HA_TOKEN	A long-lived access token created from your Home Assistant user profile's Security tab in the website
   HA_ENTITY_ID	The light's entity ID, e.g. light.bedroom, from Home Assistant's entities list on the website

3. Run the executable:

   .\target\release\taskbulb.exe
   

Usage

Shortcut	Action
Scroll	Adjust value
Shift+Scroll	Adjust brightness on all DDC/CI monitors
Ctrl+Scroll	Adjust hue (0-255)
Alt+Scroll	Adjust saturation
Middle-click	Reset hue and saturation to 0

Windows startup

To start Taskbulb automatically when the current Windows user signs in:

1. Create an install directory, for example %LOCALAPPDATA%\Taskbulb.
2. Copy target\release\taskbulb.exe and .env into that directory. The .env file must be beside the executable.
3. Open the per-user Startup folder by pressing Win+R, entering shell:startup, and pressing Enter.
4. Create a shortcut named Taskbulb in that folder. Set its target to the installed taskbulb.exe and its Start in / working directory to the install directory.

Only the shortcut should be placed in the Startup folder; keep the executable and .env together in the install directory.