Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don't want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.
LIFX: No Zigbee, no bridge. These bulbs connect to your 2.4GHz home wifi. More advanced features (schedules, scenes) live in the LIFX company server, so won't work without internet connection. But without outside internet connection, you can still use the phone app via your wifi router to control the color and brightness of individual bulbs. If you're a home automation hobbyist, you can give color and brightness commands to LIFX bulbs over your 2.4Ghz wifi, so you can program your own timed schedules that would work without outside internet connection.
Other smart bulbs: Cheaper. Philips Hue and LIFX are the two most expensive.
I understand LIFX is best for bright colors. But Philips Hue bulbs don't contain just RGB leds, but also leds for white and warn white, so the bulb may have 5 different types of leds. So Philips might produce better near-white "natural" light than same colors produced by combining only red,green,blue leds. Not sure if this matters to everyone or only to some lighting connoisseurs.
Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).
Eventually my bulbs died and I haven't gone back to smart lighting yet (though I'm considering ordering some hue or Ikea bulbs).
If you check /r/lifx on Reddit it's basically filled with people complaining about lifx's awful software.
At this point I feel like I might as well wait for Matter bridges to come out this fall, as hopefully companies will refresh their product lines then and we'll get some better quality lights.
Sounds about right.
From what I understand the number one cause of led bulb failures is heat, which causes things like capacitors to fail prematurely or poor connections to break from the repeated expansion.
All my bulbs are used in lamps or fixtures which are not enclosed which means they have plenty of ventilation.
They were cheap though!
I've used Home Assistant[0] for the last 8-9 months. It works great and has support for every device I used with Google Home. It also has bridges so that you can still use Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant for voice commands if you want that. The mobile app is good enough. It isn't as user friendly as Google Home, but it's not terrible and way more powerful.
You can run it on your own hardware, e.g. a NAS or Raspberry Pi, and they also sell purpose made hardware[1]
[0]: https://www.home-assistant.io/
[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow
But to be honest I'll be looking into getting a Home Assistant Yellow as well as this seems to be easier.
Having a REST API means the complete setup is easier to tinker with through a defined protocol and not having to resort to hack with the bulbs or any zigbee/low-level things.
I used this to play a bed time indication sequence on multiple bulbs in the living room from MIDI notes.
https://lan.developer.lifx.com/docs
But the API provided by the Phillips Hue bridge is maybe more high level.
A lightbulb should be a long-lasting, easily replaceable thing. Putting in all sorts of doodads into the base of lightbulb just strikes me as wasteful and a recipe for a brittle configuration. It's bad enough putting in a power converter, now we're talking about RF transceivers, computers, webservers, and REST API's. All this packed into a tiny very hot space packed in with silicone goop and made, often times, by disinterested bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers.
It's much better, I think, to have the light bulbs be just that, LIGHTBULBS. Of course, they can be LED's, DC powered and have multiple colors but the control and power source should be in a box away from the lights, somewhere convenient. You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light.
This would ultimately give interior designers a better palette of light sources to work with and give consumers a less annoying churn of bad choices for technology.
How do you propose to do this in a lamp or a can light with a standard light socket? Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there?
These bulbs don't have the smarts in them just because nobody thought of doing otherwise. The world is mostly made of legacy infrastructure. Hue will sell you lamps that don't use E26 bulbs, but you're not going to be changing the lights out later if you want to use something else.
Yes. Eventually. Or, more practically, do it right in new construction.
I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pain points? How do we power the control boxed? Does every lamp now have a chaining 120V and you need to hang an AC adapter off it, then weasel control wires into the lamp shade? Or do we expect them to output 12V in case you want to run them with automated controls? Or do we expect them to just pick a vendor, build in their control box and you throw out the lamp if the software sucks? In a lamp?
This solves a problem people don't have through the time-tested strategy of making people think more, do more work, and be more annoyed. I think I'm seeing why it doesn't exist.
(And yes, I know about 12VDC lights; I have a studio full of them, with DMX controls. They're not consumer-friendly.)
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VQLZBNW/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
The MagicLight app works pretty well, doesn't require cloud (though they will try and get you to sign up) and you can automate through home assistant or look at the API yourself.
I roll my own home automation system and can only recommend them because they just work.
No apps, networking, or anything, nothing to configure, just IR remote control.