Comment by adambatkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adambatkin | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago (just after I left for college) my parents decided to build a brand new house. The plan was to include a computerized lighting system where every light was individually addressable and all "light switches" were actually banks of 4 to 8 programmable buttons. The possibilities were endless! What could go wrong?

I asked my parents to use a regular light switch in my room. You know the kind that I am talking about - it goes on and off, closing and opening an electrical circuit. It would have been less expensive and (in my opinion) more reliable since after all, it's just a few pieces of metal. I joked that "when everyone else's lights are flashing on and off at 3AM, I'd like to remain asleep". My father accused me (his resident technologist) of being a Luddite and they went on their merry way, finishing construction and installing a fully-computerized lighting system.

A few months after they moved in, I got a phone call from my father that started something like this: "Please don't say 'I told you so' but I have to tell you what happened at 3AM last night..."

(they flipped that house, and when they built their next one, it had regular light switches)

I totally get the spirit of what you're saying, but to be fair a good reliable automated light-system would have an analog fail-safe that allows you to operate the lights normally in case of a malfunction of the central system, meaning that you just turn off the central system, and all the lights keep operating as normal lights that are not connected to it.

But also, centralized light systems are not new. Many corporate facilities have been using these for years and they rarely fail.

Maybe the problem is that your father just picked the wrong vendor/system.

That more or less describes how Philip's Hue works.

If the hub died, the smart bulbs can still still be operated using the regular light switch. If the bulb is in standby (smart "off") just flip the switch twice to turn it on. Then it will act like a regular bulb until the hub returns.

Hue only has one big defect with regards to this... If there's an electrical outage and the smart bulb is in standby, when power is restored the bulb will turn on. Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness.

And as an aside, the nice thing about smartbulbs as a concept is that they require zero re-wiring or specialized wiring. So if the manufacturer of your bulbs went out of business or you wanted to change vendors, just replace the bulb and your work is done. Simple.

I've seen televisions have that issue. They can come back on in the middle of the night. To me, this makes sense for a lightbulb. If your failsafe "backdoor" expects it to be wired to a switch, you would turn that switch off in the event of a power outage. What else would it do when the power comes back on?

One thing I really like about "smart" things, when the power is out at home I can check my phone to see if power is restored. I guess that's similar to calling your home to see if the answering machine is back on.

I have a couple dozen Hue lamps, and they regularly “reset” to full bright white, presumably after a flicker in power that is otherwise imperceptible. It happens on average once every couple of weeks, and is quite annoying! I wish the lamps had a nonvolatile memory so they’d return to their previous color and intensity...

(I still love them and am happy I have them rather than regular LEDs though.)

This has been suggested many times and, as far as I can tell, Philips decided the current behaviour is best safety-wise (consider e.g. if your last preset had 1% intensity).

Then reset it after three on/off cycles within 3 s, or something.

But surely the controller iwll sort this out when it gets back online a minute later?

So that everything comes on (annoying enough) but switched off within the minute?

If not that is just outrageously bad and imo ruins the product completely.

Three on-off cycles in rapid succession is exactly what you get in non-urban electrical systems when a tree falls against a wire. The local breaker detects the short to ground and cuts out, then resets after a few seconds on the chance that the tree has continued it's fall to the ground. If there's still a short, it repeats, and after the third or fourth short->cutout (depending on the local utility settings), stays off on the assumption that the tree is well and truly hung up on the line and will need a crew to fix it.

It's pretty common occurrence in many locales where I've lived.

But it's the least smart thing to do. They could at least put an option in the setting to maintain settings after brief power outages.

We had a power flicker last week in the middle of the night and suddenly our bedroom lights were on 100% and our Echo was loudly complaining that the internet was gone. At 3am.

Which is why smart things are dumb. You can't just program features, you have to program context. And context rapidly becomes non-trivial. So you either have a dumb object that no one expects to act intelligently, or you have a smart object that tries to act intelligently but fails because it's not as smart as a human, and humans are random anyway.

For smart lights you need "Return to previous state, and then see if the state was on a timer. If it was, wait until you get an NTP answer (i.e. the Internet isn't down) and set up the state requested by the timer."

Which is fine unless the previous state was a party, it's now daylight, and all the bulbs are still different colours.

Or someone was adjusting the lights and accidentally set them to 1% instead of 100% when the power went off.

Everything becomes an edge case. The most useful solution requires an intelligent default with timer support, with some awareness of what's happening in and around the house.

And it still has to allow for user overrides, because some people - like my partner - sometimes want the lights on during the day, even when the room is bright.

I think you are over-thinking things.

I also have analog switches and dimmers in my house. If I have the lights at the lowest setting when the power goes out, that's where they are when the power returns. If everything was on full when the power goes out, then that's where things will be when the power returns.

Why should smart things work differently than what a lifetime of experience has lead me to expect?

To me, this is the right thing to do. Safety aside, it "does the expected thing" if I flick the switch off and back on again.

And lights coming back on at full intensity after a power outage? Pretty common in analog houses as well. Who thinks to turn off a light that isn't on?

In analog houses, restoring the power means "lights come back as they were prior to outage". No state is lost, no matter how you spin that.

Agreed. I have been woken up from a power outage this way. We should be able to specify the default behavior when the power to the bulb is turned off. Maybe if you flip it on and off quickly within 1 second it will turn off. Or if the power is turned off to the bulb and the bridge is still on, the. Assume it was turned off. It’s not hard to come up with an OPTION for people to choose. I hate that there’s no choice, but I love my Hues.

I suppose they aren't designed for places with unreliable mains power. The auto-on behavior is just a good first approximation of the behavior most people want.

If you are going to deploy "things" that don't work the way that a traditional device does then you might want to completely mitigate the behaviour or put up with it. A UPS or multiple UPSs are indicated here.

You could go the whole hog and install enough UPS for the whole house and a backup generator.

Yes let's install a whole house UPS so the light bulbs work right...

> Hue only has one big defect with regards to this... If there's an electrical outage and the smart bulb is in standby, when power is restored the bulb will turn on. Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness

I guess the reason you have to flip the switch twice, is to prevent this problem. Then, if you get an outage during the night, it should continue to be off...

A power outage looks exactly like flipping the switch twice.

A friend of mine has Hue lights in his bathroom. The fact that they operate like normal lights when the power is interrupted is the only reason that guests have any chance of succeeding in using the bathroom without instruction.

He doesn't have a motion sensor? He could also potentially install a humidity sensor for cases like showers.

See, now it starts to become weird again. I just want the lights on in the bathroom, a motion sensor is an unneeded expense.

Yeah, and robots with laser eyes scanning for people sitting on the crapper...

See, now then you have to provide instructions to guests to wave their arms around vigorously when the lights go off mid shave!

(Just like we have to do every 30 mins in the office when there's 3 or fewer in.)

yeah, waving your arms around wildly when the lights suddenly go out is practically instinctual for many people now :-)

This is so complicated. Especially for a bathroom where there is likely only one entrance, you're no more than 5 steps from the such at any one time and you only need to operate the lights when you enter/leave.

I don't think they want to mount anything on the walls, since it's a rental, but that does sound like a good idea. Smart bulbs seem kinda useless to me, but a three-way light switch with on/auto/off might actually be really nice.

There are a few comments under here about lights that default to "ON" after a power loss. I'm not clear why manufacturers didn't spring for a few bytes of Flash memory on the device to store last state. If my BIOS can maintain the ON/OFF state of my computer after a power outage, I'm not clear why my light bulb can't.

The default setting after a power cut can be configured for Osram Lightify bulbs.

You could potentially pair it with Home Assistant to restore the state of the lightbulbs to 'off', and ensure Home Assistant has backup power in case of an outage (it takes a while to boot on an RPi3 at least).

>Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness.

That's the same with regular bulbs, so...

Dimmable, color adjustable bulbs (assuming they exist)? Oh. Didn't think so either: an analog dimmer will resume operation right where you left it, no spontaneous resets to 100%.

No, regular bulbs without a dimmer. Like 99% of households use.

Indeed. Then it's restored to previous state (which could be "on" or "off"), not reset to "always on." Even my computer's BIOS could do that ("on power restored, turn on if that was the previous state, otherwise keep off") in 2000, is the smart lightbulb dumber than that? That's a very unfortunate level: smart just enough to be annoying, but not enough to be useful.

I've never had regular bulbs that were off turn on after a power outage.

While I love my hue bulbs, I have two main gripes (beyond cost) which have kept me from replacing all the bulbs in my house:

1. As good as they have gotten, they still aren’t nearly as instantaneous as a good old fashioned switch. Yes, there are ways to mitigate this, from having it decide when to turn on to alternative controls. But that latency really gets to me sometimes.

2. The system not recalling last state. If you are worried about not being able to default to lights being on, you can make it so that a quick toggle resets it. But I can be convinced of other options/opinions here.

In general, I think the import point is how smart/dumb an object it is. It is more important how “rock solid” it is, and simple to use. I love the mantra “don’t make me think”. Devices should become “invisible” for the task you care about.

> Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness.

I'm sorry but this is unacceptable. It's what keeps me from adopting Hue in my own home.

My lighting system literally has one job, if an advancement of this technology can't keep analog reliability, I don't want it (That's a bug, not a feature).

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Hue, color changing bulbs, ability to remote control, ability to dim, etc. is awesome, but maybe should stay in a switch format if loss of power can't be handled correctly.

It would be fairly natural to have a small three-way switch onto each light to select between "central control", "override on" and "manual override off", in that order.

That way, you wouldn't have to shut down the entire system.

It would, but it would also be expensive.

Adding a switch changes the assembly process, requires extra firmware and testing, makes manufacture more complicated, demands localised labelling (unless you can work out a symbol system which maybe 50% of users won't get), and requires changes to the manual.

No doubt. This is why I think we need some sort of mandatory class-based reliability certification for a society of increasing IoT reliance. Not mandatory as in "you need to certify as at least class 3" but rather "you need to certify as some class of your choosing and clearly mark this on your packaging." The certification process should probably be cheap and flexible too. Maybe even let manufacturers self-certify the lower classes with heavy fines for abuse.

That way, it would be more clear to the customer why the product with the physical stops and manual overrides is more expensive.

Our office has something like this: dimmable meeting room lights that are controlled by a single rocker switch.

Since the only UI is "hold the switch down for longer or shorter periods, or press it repeatedly", and there are no written instructions and no discoverability, nobody can reliably work it and we routinely hold meetings in the dim half-light.

Same here, except sometimes lights will brighten and dim randomly during meetings.

It's like living in Clamp Tower from Gremlins II.

Well that's your own damn fault for not RTFM! (Had that system at an office: it came with a manual of ~200 pages, but nobody wanted to learn the special variant of Morse code that the lights understood. Somehow we found the commands for "full on" and "full off", and the manual was abandoned. Seriously, 200 pages on operating a light? Technology making lives easier, riiiight there.)

Heh, once upon a time (and this was back in 1996 or so) my parents built a house too. They opted to put an expensive "Hunter" branded ceiling fan in every room. There were no controls on the fan itself, but on the wall where a normal light switch would be, there was a plate with two small buttons. One was for the light on the fan, and one was for the fan.

Each button could be in 4 states: hi, med, low, and off. To get from one state to the next, you had to hold the button for about a second or so. Simply holding the button an less of a time would automatically put the state in 'off' (which would drive you mad in it self). My parents were cheap and rarely used the A/C (in Texas!). I would normally leave the fan setting on medium over night. But that normally meant I would be awoken at 3am to the lights on the fan being fully on....

I once stayed at a nice hotel in Bangalore with a computerized lighting system controlled by a LCD with no switches. I just kept the lights off the whole time, I couldn’t figure it out and it was so cumbersome to use anyways. Light switches are an essential luxury!

The way things work in Bangalore, the best thing to do is to call the front desk every time you want to turn the light on or off.

I definitely wouldn't use any kind of technology that doesn't gracefully fall back to working as an uncontrolled "dumb" device. Z-Wave switches are at least pretty good at this, disconnecting my hub turns them back into normal light switches.

My pet peeve is an even lower level of technology - having multiple light switches for a single light, for "convenience" means that you sometimes click "up" to turn off a light, and sometimes "down" depending on which switch was used last. The logical state and the physical state didn't sync. I found that incredibly annoying and impossible to memorize.

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