GE accidentally makes the case for not owning smart GE bulbs | Hacker News Reader

GE accidentally makes the case for not owning smart GE bulbs

theverge.com

I can't believe this is a thing that passed any internal approval...what an infuriating process. I'm curious how the cost of consumer education and returned-assumed-broken-products compare to just adding a damn reset button

Some youtube comments suggest this is intentional to make consumers buy a new bulb instead of suffering the procedure. If that were the case though, they wouldn't have bothered with a reset at all, just toss it like any other blub, and save on making help videos.

Other comments theorize was an internal-only process that was forced to be public because some later discovered bug; I disagree though, as two generations of bulbs use different versions of the timing (another, "whyyy??")

Have you tried to reset a Philips Hue switch? it does have a reset button but also requires precise timing to get it to the correct state.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, select, start? This IoT is growing into a parody of itself, without ever having worked.

The alternative is to flick the power switch on and off a bunch of times quickly which is what IKEA Tradfri bulbs do. That can easily be triggered by kids though.

A reset button isn't going to be very helpful if the bulb is fitted in a recessed light fitting.

The human factors engineering might've been using a dark pattern, but the video smells of being intended to go viral.

> If that were the case though, they wouldn't have bothered with a reset at all, just toss it like any other blub, and save on making help videos.

Case of a CYA? (cover your ass, plausible deniability) Ie, "no no, of course, we are responsible and look very, _very_ seriously on the environment, like, so serious."

It seems odd that they need to have a signal to unilaterally reset the device, when all you really need is a signal to push it back into a "receptive" state, where it will accept commands such as "reset firmware" from any control hub that connects to it.

Then, all you need to do is use a signal such as "on-off a bunch of times", at which point it goes into receptive state for, say, 30 seconds, then returns to normal operations if nothing sends it a command.

Now, if your kids decide to flip the switch on and off a bunch, all you have is a 30 second window where normal commands don't work, after which everything goes back to normal with no real harm done.

I think the issue is that sort of behavior requires coherence it may not have and can fail if say its stacks are stuck in infinite loops. That approach seems a bit more like a "launch options" than a "reset" function.

A reset signal on the chip level essentially needs to takes priority over all other processes - since if they aren't responding to requests from entering undefined behavior it will never hand over. Then once reset is achieved it restores it to a base state - implying either a default state like say all 0s or all 1s works without any logic (probably not for internet of things) or it loads over a default state from a ROM.

The way I see it, if they're able to trigger a reset routine from a series of on-off signals, they can trigger any code path from it.

A base configuration wipe or code overwrite could just as easily be a call to a separate code process/stack that runs completely isolated from all configuration values and supports the primitive commands that you'd need anyway to configure the device to a deterministic state for your use case, or update the firmware, etc. If you're able to configure the device in the first place, you're able to trigger it again since nothing on that code path ever changes, has persistent state, or reads configuration values.

Maybe this isn't the right thread for this, but it really bothers me what home IoT has become. The "connected home" should be designed solely for people with disabilities who can't see a thermostat or don't have motor control to work a lightswitch, and if it happens to be cool and trendy, that's a bonus. Instead it's this convoluted mess of many walled gardens for software engineers who don't get their fill of technology at work and want to keep working at home. Smart versions of fridges and TVs are objectively worse than non-smart, just a ploy to collect and sell data. They require tons of work to maintain and become disposable when the company moves onto a new line.

Thankfully I'm not handicapped and can use non-smart appliances, but it'd feel pretty bad to not be able to and have this kind of ecosystem as the solution.

Coincidentally, I just had to do the same procedure for a LIFX BR30 smart bulb this morning. To be fair, I doubt the timing is actually that critical, and it's more easily summarized as "turn it on and off five times." Not the worst thing ever.

However, that was just to get started. WiFi setup from iOS failed with an "unknown error" multiple times. So I had to wait 20 (!) minutes for it to fall back to the old style open-AP type configuration, open the app, manually enter my SSID and passphrase...

I bought this one bulb as a curiosity, not expecting to be impressed, but honestly wasn't expecting to find an implementation as botched as this. The day/night cycle feature seems cool until it randomly stops working. The app often can't seem to figure out if the bulb is on the network or not.

Did I choose a lemon or is this par for the industry?

It's an error recovery procedure, not something you usually need to do, so it's not important to make it quick an easy. It could be a couple steps fewer with shorter delays, but in general it's not a big deal.

What is important is that it shouldn't reset by accident, even if you have kids fascinated by light switches.

Using power on/off instead of a reset button on the bulb allows resetting of bulbs installed in hard to reach places.

why not a tiny recessed button you push with an inserted paperclip ?

Inevitably someone would electrocute themselves while trying to reset it while still in a socket.

button is on the side and inaccessible while bulb is in socket

They'd make it require a proprietary pin by making the hole a few fractions of a millimeter thinner than a paperclip.

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