Reset C by GE Light Bulbs [video]
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It would constantly lose pairing with the bulbs. In order to re-pair with the bulbs, all the bulbs had to be reset individually using this process, and then all configuration had to be deleted from the app and every bulb needed to be re-added as a new bulb. Pairing was error-prone. Firmware updates would constantly fail.
Not only that, but initially the software didn't even support turning them on or changing the color on a schedule, despite the hardware being capable of it (they added the feature later). If basic things like schedules don't work what is even the point of smart bulbs?
Looking at this error message from the app [1] might give you an idea of how sloppy their SW was. This isn't from the first version either.
After they added schedules it was a bit better since you could just set one and not touch it. And after years they've fixed some of the major bugs.
I still think smart lights are useful. Setting the lights to turn on in the morning (as a substitute for an alarm clock) is very nice, as well as changing to a warmer color temperature in the evening. But switches are superior to phones for just turning the lights on and off IMO. I think an ideal smart light system would use switches to turn them on and set brightness/color temperature, and only use the phone for advanced things like scheduling.
Why do I so often find products where the designers have chosen a less usable option even though size constraints would have easily permitted a more usable option? Here it's debatable, but every time I find a desktop app / website that has replaced labeled buttons with hieroglyphs in a hamburger menu I die a little inside.
Also, while this light bulb is bad, I feel like bluetooth earbuds still take the cake for having the worst interfaces. They combine the undiscoverable and difficult-to-actuate morse code button with a slow, obtuse interactive voice menu and bluetooth's unreliability and incompatibility to create a modern interaction hell like no other.
I assume the designers were responding to management's insistence of reducing BOM costs.
And by "designer" we're talking about EEs -- high volume low-cost hardware applications rarely have any UI team at all.
If anything, be happy that GE has not only engineered a reset procedure, but they also publish it. The most likely alternative to this is not a button but rather no published reset at all, and just call the part disposable.
This video was the result.
A professionally filmed video, even with low needs such as this one, also come with significant costs, as well as the PR fallout when people realise it's absurdly complicated compared to pressing a button with a toothpick. (As well as the support fielding they may have to end up doing).
The BOM cost of the hardware in the bulb is closely accounted for in most products like this, but it seems the cost savings on the BOM weren't accounted for elsewhere.
Some people will end up using a metal hairpin... next to an live, exposed Edison socket
Some LED lights also get quite warm
What do people that buy smart bulbs do, tape their light switches in the “on” position so you can no longer use the most convenient way to switch off? Or do they eventually get a smart switch also thereby removing the need for a smart bulb (yes I know there is things like dimming and rgb, but let’s face it the killer application of smartness is switching).
If someone had pitched the hue to me 20 years ago I would have laughed. But apparently I misjudged what people want - so why are they popular? Has anyone met everyone that said “I switched all my bulbs to smart ones with dumb switches and it’s great”? Sorry for the rant but I just feel that this isn’t what’s stupid about smart bulbs. The idea itself is fundamentally flawed or I completely missed the point.
Is this a major life improvement? Nah, not really. But having lived here for almost a decade, I can say that I like having a reasonable level of light, and the convenience that comes with the smart lights makes that less of a pain. Not like my lease would let me put in more outlets or light switches (the whole apartment is on a single 15A slow-blow fuse circuit).
But thanks for the _order_ to stop buying smart bulbs. Not like anyone has slightly different use cases for these things than the "_horrible_" replace-a-light-already-on-a-switch case that you demonize.
While I agree, a large part of the challenge is that people live in apartment buildings, where replacing light switches is out of the question, but replacing lightbulbs is doable. I personally use smart bulbs for exactly this reason.
That said, if I had a house I would either:
* use smart switches
* use smart switches + smart bulbs
Your pain has been felt. Searching the web for "smart light switch cover" will find secondary switch plates which snap on top of your existing switch. They prevent anyone from turning the physical switch off, and instead present a switch or dimmer control for your smart home to use.
Much cheaper for people not comfortable with swapping a light switch, and probably much safer for anyone that doesn't want a piece of low end garbage grade electronics from a mystery vendor inside their walls. Actual UL/CE approved in wall smart switches through a trusted supply chain are still kind of pricey, especially since the compatibility wars are still being fought.
For starters, the Hue bulbs are fairly high quality LEDs. They don't flicker excessively, they distort colors less than cheaper bulbs, and I haven't had one burn out yet. Oh, and the default color is apparently now programmable.
We normally run ours off of old-fashioned switches, with the exception of one or two rooms where the switches are badly positioned and I'm too lazy to reopen the walls.
But even years after installing the bulbs, we still use our phones to override the colors on the bulbs, or set up custom lighting configurations.
The biggest downside is that after a power outage, every light turns on. That's happened once or twice at 2am, and it meant a grumpy search for the nearest phone.
Set your lights to return to the last state after power recovery.
(It does make outtage recovery inconvenient, but that's much rarer than the day-to-day inconvenience)
... and then I realized that using a phone instead of a switch is much less convenient. Because on poweroff, Hue bulbs revert to ugly, warm color (I bought the color ones to have some mood lights), I wrote a script that repeatedly queried the Hue bridge for color values of all bulbs and changed them according to presets I liked whenever it detected that a bulb has default color values. The script ran on always-on Raspberry Pi, which was plugged in solely for that purpose. Unfortunately, in order not to saturate the bridge with API calls, this script polled the bridge only every couple of seconds, which still made the accidental reset annoying.
All in all, my experience with smart lights turned out to be pretty disappointing. You really need a smart switch for them to make sense. An ideal smart switch would be stateful and have an actuator built in, so that its mechanical state always reflects the software state of the bulb. Unfortunately, I've never seen anyone make such switches.
Insteon 2477D is an example you can look up, though I don't recommend people go with the Insteon protocol for a new build.
You seem to assume that every lamp in every home maps 1:1 to a wall switch. This is far from true.
2) yeah smart switches sound great but it's physically impossible to get them installed in the UK thanks to the unique way our electrical wiring is done - the switch on the wall only has the positive terminal in, the ground is wired directly into the bulb socket. So smart switches just don't work as they don't have anywhere to pull their own electricity from.
This is the standard practice in many countries. Wiring the return wire is unnecessary.
> So smart switches just don't work.
This is false.
There are remote controlled switches that are designed to work with a single wire. I have one right now in my room, they utilize an energy-harvesting circuit to obtain energy from the changing magnetic field surrounding the AC line to charge a capacitor to power itself. Also, it uses 433 MHz RF, so it means it doesn't have Linux and IoT craps embedded inside, no firmware upgrade, no factory reset.
Yet, I can capture the control sequence using RTL-SDR, and use a 1$ RF transmitter from my Raspberry Pi to control my light programmatically if I want, though I never needed to, fortunately.
Honestly I don't know, I'm not sure about the UK.
Perhaps those "smart" switches can't be powered by this technique due to their higher power consumption? But then, why can't one just use dumb RF switches, and put the heavy-duty digital "brain" inside a separate unit as I suggested? Because the encoding scheme doesn't scale? But it should...
In all possible ways, the same principle should be fully applicable in the UK... Sorry, I don't understand, it should be answered by someone who knows better than me...
First, let’s talk about switching on instead: It turned out that there are a lot of situation where I really want to switch the bulb on using the button. However, you can set up what the bulb should do when it starts getting power, and I set it up to turn on at reasonable brightness. So when I come into a room, I just quickly switch the switch twice (off-on). This works very well.
As for turning off, which was your complaint, it turns out that even as an energy conscious person, I rather want to turn off the light when I reached my destination. Usually, I will at least quickly be on my phone, iPad or laptop anyway, and it’s very easy to flick the control center to turn the light of the room I came from earlier (plus a few others maybe) off.
And while I don’t have a smart switch, I don’t see why you would “remove” any reasons there. One great thing I like about the smart bulbs is that they turn on when I come home, and turn off when I leave. I also have smart sockets by now, and they conveniently cut power to all my entertainment stuff when I leave, eliminating standby power.
The other benefit is sitting on the couch at evening, realizing that everything is too bright right now, and just turning most lights off and dimming the remaining ones from where I sit, not having to get up and go through the entire house.
I don’t have smart bulbs in the bathrooms. I don’t think they add anything. Bathrooms are usually turn light on, stay for a (relatively) short time, turn light off. This is the same reason why when I originally switched to energy saving bulbs, back when those were still very slow, I kept normal bulbs. I want the light in the bathroom to turn on fast, and I spend a short enough time in it to not waste too much energy.
As for guests: Not a problem. If they stay overnight, they will likely use the regular switch and turn their bulb into a dumb one. That’s okay and make sense. If they don’t stay overnight, they are usually not roaming around so much that they have to worry about lights. In the rare cases that they do, the lights temporarily turn into dumb lights, until I make them “smart” again. I don’t remember when this last happened.
Finally, especially if you don’t live alone, lying in bad and just being able to turn everything off, and not just your lights, was worth it so far.
My dumb switches works fine. I can turn it off when I leave the kitchen. When I return and flick it on it sets it to a default brightness/color. If I am entertaining I can have it pulse with the music or set the mood with a specific brightness/color. When guests visit/stay they have no idea it's a 'smart bulb' and it works as a normal light switch to them.
If I forget to turn it off at night I can turn off the bulbs from my phone. If I'm not in the kitchen and the light switch is off, yeah I can't turn it on, but who cares? A normal switch would be off anyway. When I actually go into the kitchen I just flip it on and it returns to a pre-set brightness/color.
Additionally, the Hues in particular support a wide temperature range. So if I want 'warm' or 'cool' light I can set it. With a normal LED I'd have to pick at the time of purchase.
1. I want to be able to turn them off without getting out of bed to use the switch on the wall or the lamp, for the case where I fall asleep reading in bed.
2. I want good dimming. The dimmable LED bulbs I've found that work with regular incandescent dimmers have not been very good--they don't go as dim as I'd like and they often flicker a lot when dim. There are dimmers specifically designed for LED bulbs that may work better, but I don't want to replace my lamps.
The Philips Hue bulbs dim excellently. The TP-Link/Kasa bulbs and the Merkury Innovations bulbs, which I first experimented with (they are a lot cheaper than Hue, so I used them to check out the basic idea of smart bulbs) don't dim as well as Hue--their dimming is smooth and free of flicker, but they don't dim as much. 1% on an 800 lumen Kasa is quite a bit brighter than 1% on a Hue.
3. I want to be able to change the color temperature to match what I'm doing and the time of day.
Getting a smart switch, as opposed to a smart bulb, would only address #1.
I don’t mind smart bulbs at all - I do mind the combination “single smart bulb behind dumb switch” which is the most common scenario and yet completely broken.
I must confess when I read statements like that I am inclined to do precisely the opposite. My favorite comments on HN are those expressed with less preaching and more reason.
One of the reasons I hate them is when you e.g enter an AirBnb and find the switches taped and a manual for how to switch on the lights using your phone. This really is a thing.
Good news is there are ways to integrate smart switches with open source home automation systems.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/8apv64/hue_t...
And then as the look became popular to have a couple of bulbs sprinkled throughout various dorm rooms, nerd spots, lairs, et cetera, maybe parents relented and bought more for uniformity or even just the same social buy-in with their kids. Whatever it was, it was done a light bulb at a time, and rarely as a lighting improvement project. A smart switch is something rich people buy, but a smart bulb is something everyone can buy.
So we're stuck with this lousy inverted model for a while yet.
What i want is a simple way to turn all the lights on and off, and by far the easiest way to accomplish that is smart bulbs. Especially since i'm renting, and landlords typically frown upon tenants rewiring their properties.
This is a lightbulb! Who is the intended audience. The Internet of Things really isn't ready for the general public.
I am pretty sure in this instance the initial design had a reset button, and someone had the great idea to remove it to gain a few cents.
Be sure that the people working are sure this is a really poor design, but often cost considerations trump common sense.
How often have you had to reset a device to factory default? I've only done it as part of changing the OS on a router.
They also have smart bulbs by Philips, TP-Link/Kasa, and Merkury Innovations--and all of these are in a locked display over in the electronics section. If you want them, you have to find an employee in electronics to unlock the display and grab them for you, and then you have to pay for them at the checkout in electronics. They won't let you just toss them in your cart and pay at the regular checkout.
Finally, they also have some Monster smart light products, which are in the electronics section, but not in a locked display, so you can buy them without assistance.
I have not been able to figure out any good reason for the different smart bulbs to be in different sections like this, or for some to be locked up and some not.
h/t @deshipu (the author) over at Mastodon.
In the olden days they would be part of your weekly shop, somewhere in the house a bulb would need replacing or you would be running low on them. Maybe 'weekly shop' is overstating it, but you wouldn't want to be without a spare bulb on hand.
All of those filament bulbs have been replaced. The lights you have are the lights you have. People that wanted the smart bulbs must have got them by now, old timers who don't care for such things are not going to get them. The old user interface of the switch on the wall is what most people want. The idea of having to get your phone out to turn on a light isn't of appeal to those okay with the existing arrangements. This is particularly so in the world of light pollution where it is never truly dark in built up areas.
I notice some people in the comments talk about replacing all the bulbs to smart bulbs. In America it is okay to just do this but in more frugal parts of the world there would be the aspect of waste to consider - never mind expense. Ad-hoc replacement of filament bulbs that blow with novelty smart bulbs is one thing but chucking out perfectly fit for purpose bulbs to get smart bulbs isn't how people do things outside America. Exceptions to this are when getting a new house but the housing market is kaput at the moment in most of Europe.
How is this smart bulb market going? Has it reached a plateau with everyone who wants them having them and the market declining? Or are these new bulbs that don't need a Hue base station making it happen?
I thought it was already bad when our DVRs, TVs, cars and personal electronics take time to 'boot' because they're running OSes. Now were at the point where we'll put software into just about anything and deal with the fallout. The IoT age is about to be a very inconvenient one.
Cheerful music, complicated and obviously error prone procedure, narrator that sounds really happy about what they’ve done here. The added text in the description about the firmware version.
Life is stranger than fiction sometimes. I love it. Oh and I’m never buying GE smart bulbs lol.
I suppose you could add a big capacitor or battery so that it could be reset when not in the lamp, but that is non-trivial.
function power_on() {
bool sw_pos_last = eeprom_read(SWITCH_LASTBOOT);
bool sw_pos_now = input_read(SWITCH);
if (sw_pos_last != sw_pos_now) {
eeprom_write(SWITCH_LASTBOOT, sw_pos_now);
factory_reset();
}
}
No power is needed to latch a reset request when the bulb is disconnected. Seems easy and straightforward, at worst you need to power the bulb on/off several times.
> I suppose you could add a big capacitor or battery so that it could be reset when not in the lamp, but that is non-trivial.
Even if you go this way with only a momentary switch, it's not trivial, but I don't think it's rocket science either, just an example to make the point: using a flip-flop and a 100 uF capacitor, with an isolated Vcc supply (can be supplied by the MCU). The flip-flop draws 1 mA of current at 5 volt, you press a reset switch to invert the flip-flop, when the bulb is turned on later, the MCU would read a different state and trigger the factory reset. 100 uF would give the user at least 2 minutes to react, assuming the worst capacitor. To detect the power loss of the flip-flop, use a comparator before MCU reapplies the power, the cost is less than 1 USD, and I bet the electronics engineers can come up with a even better solution.
Thanks for the feedback!