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Comment by 4rt | Hacker News Reader

my problem with being too critical of this is that hue is very open, very well documented and nothing else is.

declaring that you'll never buy another philips product ever again because they shut off hosted services support for a relatively flawed v1 device -- when a v2 device is available for £25 -- is pretty petulant imo. it will still work on your lan.

i've got 15 hue bulbs and a hue bridge but i don't use any of their cloud services. i control them via zigbee light switches on a raspi running homeassistant paired to the hue hub without any "hue cloud account" or any reliance on internet access or anything of the sort.

i don't know of another mainstream brand who will even begin to allow that without significant vendor lock-in.

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They market their bulbs as having a 15 year lifespan. It's not unreasonable for consumers to expect the hub to have at least the same lifespan. There's arguments both for longer and shorter lifespan expectations on the hub depending on perspective (it's not a regular-replacement component / it has outside dependencies that can't be maintained without cost), but a reasonable middle ground of the life of the bulb is hard to argue against. Especially as the 'starter kit' is three bulbs and a bridge.

I remain extremely glad that my IoS components at home are all based around my own central service offering. This is a massive amount of work despite me knowing what I'm doing, requires regular upkeep, and is absolutely not what is being sold to consumers when they pay a premium for products like Hue.

Lifx has an entirely open and very well documented local UDP API, and a pretty open and well documented REST API.

On top of that, no need for a bridge or base station. They can operate entirely locally with no need for a mother ship if you don't need to control them away from home.

I make pretty heavy use of the UDP API from my local server and help maintain a Go library.

Those are WiFi though, no? Not exactly the same thing. Personally, I prefer a hub/bridge and then a mesh network for Home Automation. I’ve got Hue, Z-Wave, and WeMo. I much prefer the experience with the first two now.

It's all just different flavours of radio waves.

Wifi, Bluetooth, cellular, bespoke solutions, etc. are all "just radio waves" yet entail a vast spectrum of engineering and business requirements including cost, power usage, implementation complexity, reliability, interoperability, and range.

Frequency matters for interference, also mesh versus access point makes a big difference in the real world.

The lifx bulbs require a bridge/base station.. it just happens to be a much more ubiquitous standard: WiFi.

The Philips Hue bulbs are pretty open. I use them with a Zigbee module on a raspi with no Philips Hue hub. Ie they work fine with standard Zigbee kit. You can theoretically pair them direct to other Zigbee devices without even a controller, at the expense of flexibility.

Newer Hue bulbs also work without a bridge, now that they implement Zigbee!

The old Hue bulbs are Zigbee which is why they need a bridge. The bridgeless ones have Bluetooth.

Have you looked at IKEA's offerings? I have 5 bulbs and 3 dimmers switches + Home Assistant and am very satisfied.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tradfri/

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2017/04/17/ikea-tradfri-i...

I was curious about those. How do they compare to Philips Hue in terms of colour spectrum and bulb quality? They are much cheaper and it would be great to be able to mix and match.

I non-scientifically feel like they are actually a shade more accurate and pleasing than the Hue bulbs. No idea what the actual numbers are, but at equivalent settings, the Ikea ones make the room feel a bit more like I want it to. I have a suspicion they have the better spectrum as well, but I may be wrong on that. The Trådfri bridge is a complete disaster though; color temperature can only be set to 3-ish presets that cannot be changed, even though the bulbs can do the whole spectrum, switches are very limited in what they can be programmed to do, etc., wayy behind Hue. I use their bulbs with a Dresden Electronic Conbee Stick on a Raspberry Pi and their software, works very well. The Ikea bulbs very occasionally flicker off and on again for a millisecond when paired to a Hue bridge; it's not frequent (every few days?) or very noticeable, but it's there.

I don't have any Philips Hue to compare and I also haven't tried their color bulbs. If you're still curious, I'd recommend getting a bulb that comes with a dimmer switch and try it out. It can then always be paired with the gateway if you want to go further.

I like that I can use the IKEA mobile app AND Home Assistant AND their control devices (dimmer switch, motion sensor, etc). The IKEA app allows for quick changes on the fly while Home Assistant handles automated tasks throughout the day while the control devices provide control over the bulbs when the software is too far from reach or potentially out of service. I also like the shape of the IKEA bulbs as they're more traditional and fit some old lamp shades. Cheers!

I love Xiaomi Yeelight smart bulbs. They allow LAN usage even in the official app. There is API documentation. It has been a great experience developing solutions using it.

Afaik on android they require you to grant the app the full contacts access permission to be able to use it. At least that was the case a year ago.

Not for Xiaomi specifically, but I remember allowing some apps all the permissions they needed... then blocking some of them from settings somewhere, and they worked fine (for my needs).

Haven't had the need to do that in the past couple of years, I hope that's still possible.

a relatively flawed v1 device -- when a v2 device is available for £25

So... the v2 device isn't flawed and we're not about to see a v3 device before v2 is shelved in a few years?

Also, where's it £25? They seem to offer it for £49.

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