Philips Hue bulbs are randomly turning brightness to 100% | Hacker News Reader

Philips Hue bulbs are randomly turning brightness to 100%

appleinsider.com

20 pointsxmddmx26 comments

That's what I'd like to do after a hard day of dealing with terrible technology: troubleshoot my light bulbs. Just picture it: the baby is crying, the wife is upset at you because your light bulbs aren't working correctly. You're logging into some web interface, googling, and power cycling. They could have been built better, your versions of out of date and cannot receive firmware updates. Nothing's working, so you're driving to the store to buy normal light bulbs. I only hope that more devices are only available as "smart" devices.

There's a lot to unpack here, such as your wife getting mad AT YOU for something outside of your control. That's not a tech problem.

I will say that every bulb and switch I have replaced with a Hue stuff is in a box in my garage. I didn't just throw them all away. If I ever reach a point where I'm done with the product I can just pull the old bulbs and switches and be back in action in 30 minutes. No biggie.

I set up two automations that my family adores. There's a plex webhook that dims/raises the lights just like a movie theater when we play something. In my daughters room, I set up an IR wand to "cast a spell" that dims her lights and plays her stories at bedtime.

Took a non-trivial amount of troubleshooting time to get working, but I'm happy to do it because I have the skills to do it and it's memorable for the family. What's a better use of my ability to work with terrible technology than making my family's life a little nicer?

Src: retired electrician

Tip: I never recommended to any clients that they "lock in" to any one vendor's ecosystem (e.g. no computers within lightbulbs; no touchpanels) when rewiring their homes; stick to simplicity (e.g. no ceiling fans which operate via [losable] remote)!

The wireless switching protocols are among my least favorite household ecosystems ("smart home" stuff). I have seen 90+ year old switches which still work perfectly, while the 5 year old "latest-greatest" geekswitch gets firmwared out of operation.

I finished a space recently and, when planning for the ceiling fan, ensured we had a wall switch in addition to the remote. It seems penny-wise pound-foolish to do otherwise.

Hue light bulbs work like regular lightbulbs just by flicking off and on.

Obviously this bug affects their behavior, but the deadmans logic in allowing them to just be normal with standard tech is pretty adept.

I am a simple tradesman (retired); I cannot follow your non-sequitor (no, but in this one case sure; but still, no "u adept zombie").

Am I misreading?

Add it to the list of reasons that I don't want a computer in my lightbulbs. I know a lot of you have had fun creating the smartest homes and there are definitely some legitimate use cases. But mostly I just want an inexpensive LED bulb in the usual color range that will last a pretty long time, and I can control with a switch. Generally I would rather have a smart switch than a smart bulb.

We talk about inflation a lot these days, but not too much about simple things being over-engineered to the point we can't afford them anymore. And companies apparently have little incentive to produce real budget options anymore.

So buy one of those simple bulbs. It's not like there is a shortage of them. I like my smart lights.

I have two hue bulbs. I made sure to get the BLE version with no hub.

In the rare scenario I change one from 20% brightness and red color (we did this for a nightlight when feeding baby, but then loved it), I do so manually by opening an app and connecting.

I can’t imagine dealing with all the “smart home” stuff people get into.

You made a great alternative suggestion, but I don't think the dismissive comment at the end was needed. Some people are thinking "I can't imagine having to use an app to change my bulb's brightness"

I'm pretty happy with my IKEA bulbs and switch. I have control over brightness and white tones with a switch that sits on my desk. No hubs, no logins, no firmware, not even an app.

I think the smartness should be optional and decoupled. A smart switch is nice, a smart bulb isn’t.

The switch shouldn't be smart. It should just switch based on commands.

Hue bulbs can be dumb.

The theory is that a recent Hue firmware update is causing devices using the Matter protocol to experience a connection disconnect, which is interpreted as a power loss, which triggers the "on power restore" behavior. A firmware update is expected.

AFAIR the behavior of bulbs following a power failure can be defined in the app/hub. It doesn't necessarily have to come back at 100% brightness but that is the default behavior.

This makes the most sense given that is precisely the power cycle behavior. Maybe even something with the firmware is causing a hard/soft reboot of the lightbulb which is the same as a power cycle to the software..

In my apartment in Japan the living room light came with a remote and I can easily dim it, turn it on or off, or set it to a dim night light. Having only used traditional switches I have to say it's very convenient especially in bed. It certainly feels a bit less likely to go wrong than a smart home.

That said I wired my mum's house with smart plugs and all the lights go on when she gets home and off when she goes to sleep, and she loves it. She's 72 and reaching down to toggle all the switches is getting harder for her. The plugs work via WiFi, so basically any software can control them.

Just today a friend who sold their house couple weeks ago told me this: they had an internet-connected Wi-Fi lawn irrigation system. After selling their house, they had their internet service cancelled. Along with it the Wi-Fi system turned off of course. The irrigation system loosing the internet connection decided to turn on the irrigation with nobody able to turn it off as the new owners had not moved in yet. The lawn promptly flooded with water flowing to the street for two days straight. A worried neighbor called and the buyer's agent had to go to the house to manually turn off all water in the house. So much for smart IoT systems...

Lot of people seem to feel personally attacked in this thread.

Technology born of capitalism is destined to be bug ridden hellscape: I currently have a yeti microphone on windows 11, i believe due to old/missing drivers pre-company resale, it constantly unmutes itself. Randomly crashing and default is unmuted perhaps? purposeful microsoft privacy busting perhaps? AI audio processing thinks hearing sounds means i want it to unmute? who could ever tell now?

"we have identified an interoperability issue [..] in which random temporary radio traffic disruptions are incorrectly recognized as legacy switch power toggles"

Yeah right, this is some nice BS. These lamps are driven by Zigbee, Please explain to me how "random radio traffic disruptions" are able to disrupt a protocol that has built in proper AES-128 encryption.

> Please explain to me how "random radio traffic disruptions" are able to disrupt a protocol that has built in proper AES-128 encryption.

Radio traffic disruption, not data manipulation. Like when your network hub stops working or someone is using a microwave in the next room, for example. Most zigbee devices are transmitting in the 2.4Ghz band, which makes them very susceptible to being drowned out by EMI.

Sure, so this clearly disrupts the transmission. But since there is strong encryption and authentication used in the Zigbee protocol, the chance of a mangled frame ending up at higher level in the protocol stack is approximately zero - anything messing up the frames will invalidate any hash so the receiver will discard these frames.

At least they're not EVs going full throttle.

Acceleration problems are not limited to EVs.

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