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Comment by jm1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

This is not practical, if I use it as a baby cam I want the light to be off.

We have been using it to watch our non-verbal young autistic son in bed. I know a tiny light in a pitch black room keeps him awake for many hours of the night and he doesn’t do being awake quietly so it also keeps us awake. We also can’t just remove the camera, it’s not like he is able to tell us that he has wet his bed. Having been given zero days notice of this change means I’m going to have to take time off work today to go home to find an effective way to put some tape over the light.

I have been holding back on deciding which home automation ecosystem I want to buy into. I was leaning towards Google and Nest was our first step into that direction. However I’m now increasingly of the opinion that I should just continue to build it out with devices where I have control over the firmware.

1. Pretty much every audio baby monitor in existence has an LED on it, those cause no problems.

2. Duct tape/sharpie

(1) Not a blinking one, though. That's a little more annoying.

(2) there's a nice product called LightDims that are removable. Little stickers that are about 95% opaque.

> (2) there's a nice product called LightDims that are removable. Little stickers that are about 95% opaque.

You can also use colored electrical tape as it is opaque (buy quality tape like the 3M brand). I've found that the best colors to use are white or yellow. Other colors work too but let less light through like red, magenta, and blue. Though those darker colors are beneficial for very bright LEDs.

I taped over all the annoying LED's on my router, switch, and low power server which live in my bedroom on my desk. It went from discotheque to barely noticeable.

It is practical.

The light could be designed to not be disruptive even to a baby, or you could build a physical switch into the device to turn the light off.

It just shouldn't be remotely configurable because that undermines some of the purpose of the indicator.

If it’s connected to a physical switch you could still turn it off.

I wouldn't trust it as a baby cam - the Nest or anything that relies on wifi. If you do, probably a good idea to add a cheap audio monitor as well.

Why not? I've been using one for two years now. It works fine, and allows me to 'roam' a bit farther than a simple RF transmitter.

Vastly more ways for it to fail without being immediately obvious to the user.

I tried a Nest but went back to an IP camera because the Nest can't be monitored off a local feed — it has to go to the cloud first. Most of the time when I'm looking at the baby monitor I'm at home. Requiring me to send it to the cloud before seeing it on my local device is bad for two reasons:

1: If the internet goes out, I can't even monitor locally. With IP cameras, it doesn't matter if the internet goes out.

2: Since the camera is always transmitting to the cloud, I don't want to use a very high-resolution option, which would eat up too much upstream bandwidth. What I really want is to have moderate-quality footage going to the cloud and high-def footage whenever I go to check it in real time. With an IP camera, it's only transmitting when I'm actually connected to the feed.

One solution is to apply some sharpie or electrical tape to the light.

Same - hugely frustrating.

A low-power red LED shouldn't be keeping anyone awake.

You dont get to pick what keeps infants and toddlers awake, my dude.

I don't believe that most children would be bothered by a single, dim red LED. If your child is, it's easy to cover it a bit of electrical tape. So arguing against a feature with clear and significant security value because you don't want to risk the possibility of having to fiddle with tape is silly, my dude.

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