Hue Light Hack
atomic14.com
atomic14.com
I bought two cheaper bulbs and won't buy any more of those because of this. So I guess if the reason is "money grab" i have to grudgingly admit it was successful.
In the end, it would have been cheaper and less time consuming had I just bought the Philips Hue strips.
I'm told there are cheaper equivalent solutions out there, but Sowilo's mostly turnkey solution was good enough for me. It helps keep S.A.D. at bay.
The key learning from my research was to buy commercial grade PSUs and LEDs from a proper retailer that supplies industry and over spec the PSUs - if you calculate your LEDs need 40w, get something like a 60w PSU. I don’t think it cost significantly more than if I purchased cheap no name Chinese stuff off Amazon.
As a side note, I didn’t go for the Hue strips because the LEDs would have been a lot less bright, the cut points were far more restrictive and it also would have worked out more expensive.
I started home automation with a Philips Hue starter kit but built my own zigbee network with Home Assistant later on. I'd say IKEA light bulbs, being around half the price of Philips, are pretty much on par with them.
The worst lights I had were OSRAM, they kept losing the zigbee connection and were PITA all the time.
The IKEA bulbs aren’t as bright, get overwhelmed if you send a lot of commands quickly (so you can’t implement a dimmer for example, without the light jittering as it dims), and don’t have the “turn power on-and-off quickly to reset to full brightness” feature (though this is nice if that’s what you specifically want).
However, if I was starting from scratch today, I'd probably just install dimmer switches in the wall and skip the IoT aspect entirely.
The only downside (apart from the idiosyncratic physical knob design) is that it's a tuya platform device, but the manufacturer also markets a DIY version which is trivially flashable to open source tasmota or ES32Home, severing the connection to the mothership entirely while retaining all functionality.
Just let me flick the switch, and then turn the lights on as and when you manage to successfully connect, don't make me wait.
I have a hue bridge with a static ip in my house that controls my lights. Management through a third party app is instant.
Are you individually connecting to each light through Bluetooth?
It's nice that the BT function is there, as a failover, but day to day I would not rely on it.
Source: recently rebound all my Zigbee lights away from my Hue hub to being directly controlled by Home Assistant.
It would be sort of nice if the hub would provide a convenient website. Visitors don’t want to use an app to turn on my lightbulbs.
There are button peripherals, which work fine of course, but then it is not much more convenient than a light switch or a remote.
For the most part I use motion sensors and timers and rarely need a switch
In theory you could get a Pi to host a website that talks to the Hue hub's REST API. Actually, I'd be surprised if such a thing doesn't exist on GitHub, but it could be a hunt to find one with has a more than decent UI.
I know this is Hacker News, but the classic hackers lost that linguistic battle or at least achieved stalemate decades ago. If you're going to use the word "hack" in a post about something internet-connected, in a way where either meaning of the word is equally plausible, please use a more descriptive title. I note the author of this post did that for their YouTube video linked at the bottom: "Hacking a Philips Hue Light - Teardown and Reuse"
chills of terror
got even funnier at house parties where people on various psychedelics did not know what had just happened.
Oh that is just devious.
The classic hackers weren't above breaking computer or even physical security where they felt it was in the way of their work or curiosity, either, so in relation to pre-extortionist hacking it's probably less like a battle Stallman and others branded it as and more like a messy civil war. Of course, once less-than-technical reporters get into it, everybody else might as well give up (witness "dark web").
I did have the same misunderstanding as you, to be fair :)
I'm barely an expert with embedded/EE, more like an engineer with 5 years experience in the field. If there is anything that is extremely basic, its LEDs.
I was wondering if they were going to be able to figure out how to send bits through wifi to control the light without any auth.
Nope, they rewired the board to external LEDs.
I should feel like a genius after seeing someone put the time into this, and HN upvoted it. Instead I'm a bit disappointed.
My biggest gripe is the unserious development of their iOS app, which has really been a hurdle to get them setup correctly.
The app underwent a rebuild maybe 18 month ago, which forced users to allow for phone Widgets to ONLY be created via the Apple Shortcuts app. Shortcuts, to be clear, is a great app on the iPhone, but this introduces an extra step, requiring you to ALSO create the correct Scenes for your particular Rooms, with particular Lights, FIRST, ensure they're named / setup in a clear manner, THEN add them to Shortcuts, THEN create a Shortcuts, and export, add to your homescreen. The previous method, was Hue app itself was a Widget, independent of a second app.
It honestly boggles the mind the Philips team went in this direction and speaks to how little user feedback they did. It has deliberately made using their product harder, and make life a little easier. It no joke took an entire day to get like 6 scenes setup properly.
I know there are 3rd party apps that quickly solve this. But such a basic feature like "Make a button on my homescreen I can tap to instantly turn on/off all the lights in my home" a chore is ludicrous. I thought IoT was supposed to make life easier.
Admittedly for submarines light pollution can be life-or-death (because you don't want an enemy submarine to spot you) and it's a little less critical in cities already full of light pollution at all hours.
(Or like me, for my sins, have a single blue LED on a piece of hardware that lights the room bright enough to read by)
I wish they'd supply this information before you purchase. I want to know lumen RANGE.
A range would definitely be nice.
It's a shame, really, because it seems like the expensive bulbs might meet your needs while their cheaper ones don't. Granted, the filament bulbs do seem to fall more in line with the regular bulbs, so might be worth exploring.
If you don't mind going old-school, I picked up a five-pack of directional nightlights at the local hardware store for $20.
They plug into an outlet, only turn on when it's dark, and swivel so you can aim the beam at the tripping hazard of your choice.
I also put one in the bathroom outlet over the cat's litter box, to help her out.
It's just a tiny light bulb and a photodiode, so it's super simple, ultra-reliable, and completely unhackable.
But then dimming is then bucketed to 32 discreet steps where we enable anywhere from 1 to all 32 LEDs for the different levels.
No flicker, and perhaps at a single LED you get that very low-level dimming.
i just have these all over my place. i don't need to turn anything on or off or mess with settings.
The color bulbs in particular are horribly dim, but fun nonetheless.
The only failure I've encountered in ~10 years is my original Hub started crash looping a few years ago and I ended up getting a new starter kit to replace it. The bulbs seem to really last, however.
What do you mean, do they not produce the advertised number of lumens?
Just looking at specs, their highest output coloured bulb produces 1521 lumens at 4000K white colour temperature and 1055 lumens at 2700K [0].
That's very close to the brightest regular bulb I can find in stores (1600 lm).
[0] - https://www.philips-hue.com/en-gb/p/hue-white-and-colour-amb...
I suppose I have to consider replacing everything now...
I suspect the cause is mostly heat-related. As newer bulbs run much cooler I expect reliability will be better, but the product line is definitely not bullet-proof.
Excellent; we're getting to the point of lightbulbs having as much compute as computers used to:)
Then at 3:55 he gets shocked from touching those same terminals (as he should), with the circuit disconnected from the AC line, to segue into the need to discharge capacitors. This is what makes me question how much of his "getting hurt" is actually acting.
(Also just in case anyone is watching those videos and thinks there's a distinction between his usual haphazard behavior and when he gives explicit "safety" advice - there isn't).
In this case I'd guess he's got some decent calluses and any leakage current isn't going through any nerves. Also he's only touching it lightly so won't be making very good contact.
The app was awful a few years ago but they took the feedback in stride and made something responsive and usable (lots of headroom for improvement but I can't overstate how bad the app was on launch).
Remember when lightbulbs were thin glass with a bit of wire?
At least the new LEDs are better, hiding their electronics in the screw base and the LEDs are placed on a strip.
LED light bulb might be less ecological but having to produce 40x as much (including packing, shipping, storing etc) incandescent on top of higher energy production required ought to compensate enough for that.
But if random LEDs customers buy burn out after few years for bad design reasons that's not great...
For anyone that missed the recent rabbithole of commentary on LED quality last month:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35371750 (35 days ago - 942 comments)
I dunno if Mr Greening frequents Hacker news, but
s/prize if off/pry it off/gFixed now. Looks like “pry” was chosen.
I do wonder what those from other countries where other spellings are more common think when us Americans come in and correct them, as if our spelling is objectively more correct...
I think it's interesting the sorts of things where we assume we know how something's said or done and then it turns out that's not a universal thing. On the one hand, best not to assume if one can help it. On the other hand, it's impractical to for example look up every word for cultural context before using it/voicing something based on an assumption around it.