Why has UX regressed so much in these areas?
There is no further integration, or smart app etc.
I can't see which light switch is on or off, so even after years living here I mix up some of the switches.
Sometimes the radio pulse doesn't register, so I have to go back to the switch and press it again.
After pressing the switch, there's a perceivable, variable delay for the light to come on.
Guests are confused.
There are only downsides with such a system.
The big advantage is that it provides separate fan and light controls without needing to run new electrical wires through the wall and ceiling.
But the functionality of the switch can be emulated with with a software defined radio attached to a 1GHz Raspberry Pi running Linux. It works great, but an out of date kernel enables a virus that spreads from light-switch to light switch and performs a light show on the evening of 4th of July in any calendar year.
I'm in a 40 year old apartment with a lot of switches that now affect nothing, because they broke and no one fixed the wires ('cause landlords are cheap). I wouldn't want to change this for a bunch of wireless switches but it's easy to imagine landlords of the future wanting nothing but glue on fixtures - routing wires costs significant money.
All our lights in our rented apartment are ikea TRÅDFRI smart lights, we have the ikea 5 button remote in a lot of the rooms and google home's spread around.
The whole system works with zigbee -> mqtt and home assistant and it took me a year to iron the bugs out. But generally it seldomly takes over half a second for the lights to respond to a command. If something breaks down it's almost always because I changed a config, not by itself. And it's really fun and nice to be able to make any button do any action by just editing an UI :) Or automate something we feel should happen by itself.
I like to think of it as it being a system that we can fit around our own lives and how we like things, instead of having to accept the situation as is (button is here and controls this light at this brightness). And it's not overly expensive either!
I don't know if that's possible with remote switches, but with zigbee there's overlap possible. (https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coex...)
Or maybe the batteries in the remote are running low?
And if you would like to also control that light using an app on your phone or voice commands if you use "Ok google": the Broadlink RM Pro could maybe allow you to control the light using an app.
A power indicator light would do the trick...
But in all seriousness, your bluetooth headphones should have a sim card built in and be an IoT slave to the cloud. So that when you turn them off, they send a message to Alexa, Google, and Siri, so that all of your devices can tell you "YOUR HEADPHONES ARE NOW OFF" at the same time. Like a tiny choir of angels informing you of the new state of your device.
But of course, there will be one slow/older device that lags 0.3 seconds behind and says "HEADPHONES...OFF", completely out of sync with the rest, like a rebel.
Damnit, toilet! Get with the times...
The version on the original site now links to here:
https://adirobertson.itch.io/wake-word
for those who haven't played it yet.
Google Wifi is one of the worst offenders. They might as well market it as a wifi-repeating lamp.
It is incredibly hard to find this. I have one somewhere, but the knob was a little silly:
I think a better design would be a ring around the circumference that you twist.
But I agree - when it came to putting a good stereo in my car (when you used to be able to do such a thing) I always kept looking until I found one with an actual volume knob. In a moving car - grabbing a knob and finding the right volume level is immediate and doable.
By the way, schiit hel: https://www.schiit.com/products/hel
There is one: the Jetbeam RRT-01, at least certain iterations of it. Most designs use a separate power switch.
This isn't more common because there's a patent covering using a Hall effect sensor in a ring around a flashlight body for this purpose, and the patent holder, Surefire has sued several manufacturers and vendors over it. A well-funded challenge would probably succeed on obviousness grounds, but patent challenges are expensive and I don't think the flashlight industry is profitable enough to justify it. The patent expires in three years, so this will probably become more common then.
Funny that I didn't see one from surefire. They should be cleaning up.
You can try searching for "infinitely variable" flashlights. Jetbeam RRT01 is one such example.
For a little extra "oomph", there's also https://skylumen.com/collections/v54-lights?sort_by=created-...
In other cases its usually to double dip on input components.
And when I switch it, it should turn on or off fast enough close to instantly: this should not be a high-cost operation which requires a UX mitigation.
If I toggle a light switch accidentally, I'm not concerned about it, because it's so easy and fast to correct my mistake.