6 ms·

Bluetooth LED bulbs

127 points by uggedal 10y ago

crottypeter 10y ago
Why is wireless necessary? Isn't ethernet over power a more obvious solution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug
- legooolas 10y ago
  That's exactly what X10 does, but it's fallen out of favour in recent times. (I've not used it so I couldn't say why)
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    I used to use X10. Then I discovered the hard way that buying low-bidder electronics that plug directly into mains power is a really bad idea: one of the control boxes that plugged into a wall outlet started to get hot enough to create a blackened spot on its label.
  - gregmac 10y ago
    X10 is particularly horrible for a couple of reasons. For one I'll quote from the Wikipedia entry: > In the 60 Hz AC current flow, a bit value of one is represented by a 1 millisecond burst of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (nominally 0°, but within 200 microseconds of the zero crossing point), immediately followed by the absence of a pulse. A zero value is represented by the absence of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (pulse), immediately followed by the presence of a pulse. Command sequences are only 2 bytes (16 bits) long, and for certain commands ("all lights on", "all lights off") four of those bits are even ignored. This means it's quite common for electrical noise to be mistaken for signals. The other problem is increasingly we have more noisy electrical gear on the line, and more equipment that absorbs/filters the actual signals (UPSes, and pretty much any switch-mode power supply in computers, TVs, etc). I unfortunately put in a bunch of X10 stuff at my parent's cottage many years ago, and it had this problem. Somewhere between every couple days and every few weeks, all the lights would turn on. Sometimes while no one was there, sometimes in the middle of night when you were sleeping :) We since replaced it with Insteon dual-band, which uses both wireless and powerline, and it's significantly more reliable (and all those problems have disappeared). In case anyone's interested, we used this stuff because the main floor is basically one big open concept space, and has entrances on all four sides (deck, sunroom, stairs and front door) and the 'smart' switches avoided having to install a stupid amount of 3- and 4-way switches that were originally planned. There's now a keypad by the front door and one in the middle (between kitchen area and sunroom) that can control everything, and a few individual switches by other doors. You can press 'all off' by the front door when leaving and all 6 or 7 circuits in the main area plus the sunroom, hallway, stairs, and foyer turn off.
  - elf25 10y ago
    I have X-10 at two of my homes to operate a couple of lights, no real problems to report.
- Johnythree 10y ago
  If you don't mind the radio interference and the general flakiness of HomePlug...
  - furyg3 10y ago
    Back in the day X10 (very simple protocol, on/off/dim, no security) actually worked very well, with only a small delay. It's really horrible that 15+ years in the future it's all still so awful. It's really, really hard to beat the user-interface (or security!) of a traditional light switch or dimmer. I'd like to have control without getting up, automate some things, or change the colors, but that all comes at a huge cost.
    - legooolas 10y ago
      This is possible, but requires different wiring to light switches, to provide power there (which isn't common) and for manufacturers of replacement switches, bulbs etc to care about security. The former isn't something which is happening yet anywhere that I know of (in the UK at least, even in new-build houses), and the latter needs pressure from consumers which isn't happening for anything in the internet-of-things space yet :/ (edit: don't try to use markdown in HN comments, however automatic it has become for you :)
      - lucaspiller 10y ago
        I think the wiring issue is mainly a UK thing. The standard way of wiring light switches in the UK is live and neutral go to the ceiling rose, and then another two wires goes to the switch which joins the live when on. This reduces the amount of wire needed, which stems back to after WWII when copper was in short supply. I've just bought an apartment in mainland Europe and the live and neutral go to the switch, and from there two wires go to the rose.
        CapitalistCartr 10y ago
        This is also the standard way in the USA. Its called a switch leg.
- noja 10y ago
  Powerline doesn't work when you have a house with multiple circuits.
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    That's not true. Current-gen stuff works for me across circuit breakers. I haven't enabled any encryption, though, so it's probably packets in the clear that maybe even my neighbor could get. cringe
    - jon-wood 10y ago
      That led to a wonderful evening of debugging during which I was convinced someone was attacking my wireless network. I eventually worked out that my powerline adapters had connected to next door's circuit, and his DHCP server was slightly quicker than mine.
- mkj 10y ago
  WiFi chips are a fair bit cheaper, and don't need to integrate with the mains voltage side.
unwind 10y ago
The 0x56 that is shown as the first packet data byte when setting new color/intensity is ASCII for 'V'. Perhaps for "Value"? Always fun to theorize about hidden names, considering that somewhere somebody probably reasoned themselves into picking 0x56 over the other values.
raverbashing 10y ago
Oh "encrypted", and of course it uses AES ECB mode Probably enough to tick a box though
- jfindley 10y ago
  That is the least of the problems with it. It's very, very odd. On top of the craziness Matthew notes in his article, the code actually appears to use ROT13. Twice. I have no idea why.
- frankus 10y ago
  I'm curious if you could use "cycles since power was applied" as a shared secret for pairing lamps to a wall switch.
DiabloD3 10y ago
"Oh hey, a post by mjg59 involving IoT devices, this should be good." mjg59 never fails to disappoint.
- sevensor 10y ago
  Every one of them is a gem. It's amazing what people will do to get a terrible product to market.
userbinator 10y ago
I found the use of a simple binary protocol rather unexpected but pleasant; it is reminiscent of I2C. Given what the software industry is like today, I was actually expecting some ridiculous combination of HTTP, JSON, SOAP, XML, or a similar level of bloat... for once, it's good to see some down-to-earth sanity here.
petra 10y ago
I'm curious why the chinese don't build open-source friendly stuff. They already sell mostly commodities. What's there to lose if someone builds stuff for you ?
- VLM 10y ago
  If people bought more stuff from seeed studio which is in that business model, than perhaps LG or Apple or Philips which is not in that business model, then China would be better known for open source stuff. I've bought stuff from seeed studio before. Nice stuff, nice people. Obviously your mileage may vary WRT individual pieces of hardware.
  - petra 10y ago
    I'm thinking more about full complete products. For example connected stuff(either to app or site). Also there's a case to be made for letting people change the embedded software inside their bluetooth headphones, noise cancelling earphones, routers,mp3 players[1], android tv boxes, and any other products with complex software. [1]There's a custom rom for that called rockbox
- andrey_utkin 10y ago
  Outdated paranoic "intellectual property" guarding in corporations. Would love more openness from hardware manufacturers, too.
- antoniuschan99 10y ago
  I'm building www.facebook.com/kokonautweathersensors which uses a nodeMCU so it's open source. There's also a lot of stuff at seeedstudio.com or electrodragon.com that is open source too. Also, this episode describes where China/Shenzen is at right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k
  - rb808 10y ago
    Your domain www.kokonautweathersensor.com gives unknown host.
rollulus 10y ago
BLE is king for hobby tinkering. You can even re-use the common and dead cheap NRF24L01+ radio module with some hacks [1]. [1]: http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-low-energy-with-a-cheap-nrf24l01-module/ http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-l...
impostervt 10y ago
I'm interested in making a door movement sensor with a remote alarm to wake me up if my sleepwalking daughter goes roaming. As a software person who is just getting into electronics (played with a particle photon, just bought the Make: Electronics book & component kit to learn), what are the options when you want to have two pieces of hardware communicate inside a house? - Bluetooth - limited range? - Wifi - requires you to join each piece to the network, seems a hassle/expensive for simple electronics. - Xbee - expensive! - RF transmitter/receiver - seems cheap, but maybe distance is limited and there may be a lot of noise? Anything else?
- andrey_utkin 10y ago
  You didn't mention wires. And I think it's worth considering. Most probably your sensor is going to be connected to power plug (if it goes detached). So why not to situate mini-server (RPi-alike) nearby, with a sensor connected by wire?
  - impostervt 10y ago
    Not sure I follow. The door sensor is going to be hanging on my daughter's door, and the alarm would be in my room, probably 40 ft away.
    - andrey_utkin 10y ago
      Wherever you place the sensor, it most probably needs power supply. Batteries die, so I'd go with plugging into power socket. Since we use a nearby (to daughter's door) power socket, we could insert _right_there_ a mini-PC to control the sensor (because sensor just senses, and you need some "digital brain" to do something with results of sensing). Then mini-PC could notify you in a lot of possible ways.
- slig 10y ago
  Look up the ESP8266. It's a very cheap piece of hardware that you can program using the Arduino IDE. It can connect to your local WiFi easily and send a push notification to your phone. So you can build something like this using a simple PIR sensor + ESP8266.
dekhn 10y ago
If you want to play with Bluetooth Low Energy and devices, your best bet is the Arduino 101. It includes BLE and a nice, simple API to handle BLE characteristics. Combine the 101 with a MOSFET attached to digital pins, running the BLEFirmata sketch, and you can remotely control a number of high-power LEDs from your phone.
StavrosK 10y ago
What a coincidence, I just finished making my wifi-controlled RGB LED strip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg I'm currently writing this up, but I'm loving the fact that I can integrate it with games, and I want to add some more. Next goal is for my living room's lighting to pulse orange or blue depending on which team scores in Rocket League. If anyone knows how I can hook into the game to get various pieces of info, please let me know.
joshgel 10y ago
Here is someone else who reverse engineered a slightly more complicated WiFi based protocol: https://github.com/beville/flux_led https://github.com/beville/flux_led. It's pretty well done, though he also has these magic numbers around that he couldn't quite figure out what they were there for. I used this and hacked an amazon button to control my home lighting and it works great. All these seems like more argument to standardized IoT.
post_break 10y ago
I love my Wifi lifx bulbs. Amazing output, low latency, and the standby usage is 0.7w when off. My biggest complaint is there is no physical switch to turn them on and off. Using my phone is slower than a switch, and if I switch them off they won't be able to come back on with my phone or IFTTT schedule. 0.7w seems low to me for standby.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  What if wall switches were replaced by very simple phones...or even watches. It would effectively be running the one app all of the time, defaulted to the lights in the room. There could even be some sort of hard-wire bus between this switch and the bulbs, to communicate through RF interference.
  - jmiserez 10y ago
    Or just use something like the Philips Hue Tap [1], which sends an RF signal (ZigBee) solely using the energy from your button press (no batteries). [1] http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-switch http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-...
    - post_break 10y ago
      I wish this would work with LIFX. I refuse to go to Hue but man I want a physical switch.
  - michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    With the drastic price fall of Android tablets (mostly the Amazon Fire) - there have been a few enterprising people that have hacked them into basically being "smart switches" for their homes. The results are still a little too janky for my taste but the costs are getting there.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    This is what I do. I use my old android phones, on a dedicated network. I'm also building a RPI kiosk to manage them
Girlang 10y ago
We've been using WiFi lightbulbs. Even easier. Of course, I don't trust them on my real WiFi network (they are from China) so I set up a separate network just for them. The advantage is they're easy to talk to and have a great range.
floch 10y ago
i've been tinkering with the misfit bolt which is a bluetooth bulb, and some fella (@fayep) posted that on my GH repo last week: http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_interface_v1.0.pdf http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_inter... - this seems to be common to several implementation of bluetooth bulbs as the bolt works with these specs. couple implementations for these: https://github.com/fayep/bolt https://github.com/fayep/bolt, https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue, https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt (last one is mine, largely inspired by the two above)

127 points by uggedal 10y ago

Why is wireless necessary? Isn't ethernet over power a more obvious solution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug

legooolas 10y ago
That's exactly what X10 does, but it's fallen out of favour in recent times. (I've not used it so I couldn't say why)
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  I used to use X10. Then I discovered the hard way that buying low-bidder electronics that plug directly into mains power is a really bad idea: one of the control boxes that plugged into a wall outlet started to get hot enough to create a blackened spot on its label.
- gregmac 10y ago
  X10 is particularly horrible for a couple of reasons. For one I'll quote from the Wikipedia entry: > In the 60 Hz AC current flow, a bit value of one is represented by a 1 millisecond burst of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (nominally 0°, but within 200 microseconds of the zero crossing point), immediately followed by the absence of a pulse. A zero value is represented by the absence of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (pulse), immediately followed by the presence of a pulse. Command sequences are only 2 bytes (16 bits) long, and for certain commands ("all lights on", "all lights off") four of those bits are even ignored. This means it's quite common for electrical noise to be mistaken for signals. The other problem is increasingly we have more noisy electrical gear on the line, and more equipment that absorbs/filters the actual signals (UPSes, and pretty much any switch-mode power supply in computers, TVs, etc). I unfortunately put in a bunch of X10 stuff at my parent's cottage many years ago, and it had this problem. Somewhere between every couple days and every few weeks, all the lights would turn on. Sometimes while no one was there, sometimes in the middle of night when you were sleeping :) We since replaced it with Insteon dual-band, which uses both wireless and powerline, and it's significantly more reliable (and all those problems have disappeared). In case anyone's interested, we used this stuff because the main floor is basically one big open concept space, and has entrances on all four sides (deck, sunroom, stairs and front door) and the 'smart' switches avoided having to install a stupid amount of 3- and 4-way switches that were originally planned. There's now a keypad by the front door and one in the middle (between kitchen area and sunroom) that can control everything, and a few individual switches by other doors. You can press 'all off' by the front door when leaving and all 6 or 7 circuits in the main area plus the sunroom, hallway, stairs, and foyer turn off.
- elf25 10y ago
  I have X-10 at two of my homes to operate a couple of lights, no real problems to report.
Johnythree 10y ago
If you don't mind the radio interference and the general flakiness of HomePlug...
- furyg3 10y ago
  Back in the day X10 (very simple protocol, on/off/dim, no security) actually worked very well, with only a small delay. It's really horrible that 15+ years in the future it's all still so awful. It's really, really hard to beat the user-interface (or security!) of a traditional light switch or dimmer. I'd like to have control without getting up, automate some things, or change the colors, but that all comes at a huge cost.
  - legooolas 10y ago
    This is possible, but requires different wiring to light switches, to provide power there (which isn't common) and for manufacturers of replacement switches, bulbs etc to care about security. The former isn't something which is happening yet anywhere that I know of (in the UK at least, even in new-build houses), and the latter needs pressure from consumers which isn't happening for anything in the internet-of-things space yet :/ (edit: don't try to use markdown in HN comments, however automatic it has become for you :)
    - lucaspiller 10y ago
      I think the wiring issue is mainly a UK thing. The standard way of wiring light switches in the UK is live and neutral go to the ceiling rose, and then another two wires goes to the switch which joins the live when on. This reduces the amount of wire needed, which stems back to after WWII when copper was in short supply. I've just bought an apartment in mainland Europe and the live and neutral go to the switch, and from there two wires go to the rose.
      - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
        This is also the standard way in the USA. Its called a switch leg.
noja 10y ago
Powerline doesn't work when you have a house with multiple circuits.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  That's not true. Current-gen stuff works for me across circuit breakers. I haven't enabled any encryption, though, so it's probably packets in the clear that maybe even my neighbor could get. cringe
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    That led to a wonderful evening of debugging during which I was convinced someone was attacking my wireless network. I eventually worked out that my powerline adapters had connected to next door's circuit, and his DHCP server was slightly quicker than mine.
mkj 10y ago
WiFi chips are a fair bit cheaper, and don't need to integrate with the mains voltage side.

unwind 10y ago

The 0x56 that is shown as the first packet data byte when setting new color/intensity is ASCII for 'V'. Perhaps for "Value"? Always fun to theorize about hidden names, considering that somewhere somebody probably reasoned themselves into picking 0x56 over the other values.

raverbashing 10y ago

Oh "encrypted", and of course it uses AES ECB mode Probably enough to tick a box though

jfindley 10y ago
That is the least of the problems with it. It's very, very odd. On top of the craziness Matthew notes in his article, the code actually appears to use ROT13. Twice. I have no idea why.
frankus 10y ago
I'm curious if you could use "cycles since power was applied" as a shared secret for pairing lamps to a wall switch.

DiabloD3 10y ago

"Oh hey, a post by mjg59 involving IoT devices, this should be good." mjg59 never fails to disappoint.

sevensor 10y ago
Every one of them is a gem. It's amazing what people will do to get a terrible product to market.

userbinator 10y ago

I found the use of a simple binary protocol rather unexpected but pleasant; it is reminiscent of I2C. Given what the software industry is like today, I was actually expecting some ridiculous combination of HTTP, JSON, SOAP, XML, or a similar level of bloat... for once, it's good to see some down-to-earth sanity here.

petra 10y ago

I'm curious why the chinese don't build open-source friendly stuff. They already sell mostly commodities. What's there to lose if someone builds stuff for you ?

VLM 10y ago
If people bought more stuff from seeed studio which is in that business model, than perhaps LG or Apple or Philips which is not in that business model, then China would be better known for open source stuff. I've bought stuff from seeed studio before. Nice stuff, nice people. Obviously your mileage may vary WRT individual pieces of hardware.
- petra 10y ago
  I'm thinking more about full complete products. For example connected stuff(either to app or site). Also there's a case to be made for letting people change the embedded software inside their bluetooth headphones, noise cancelling earphones, routers,mp3 players[1], android tv boxes, and any other products with complex software. [1]There's a custom rom for that called rockbox
andrey_utkin 10y ago
Outdated paranoic "intellectual property" guarding in corporations. Would love more openness from hardware manufacturers, too.
antoniuschan99 10y ago
I'm building www.facebook.com/kokonautweathersensors which uses a nodeMCU so it's open source. There's also a lot of stuff at seeedstudio.com or electrodragon.com that is open source too. Also, this episode describes where China/Shenzen is at right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k
- rb808 10y ago
  Your domain www.kokonautweathersensor.com gives unknown host.

rollulus 10y ago

BLE is king for hobby tinkering. You can even re-use the common and dead cheap NRF24L01+ radio module with some hacks [1]. [1]: http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-low-energy-with-a-cheap-nrf24l01-module/ http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-l...

impostervt 10y ago

I'm interested in making a door movement sensor with a remote alarm to wake me up if my sleepwalking daughter goes roaming. As a software person who is just getting into electronics (played with a particle photon, just bought the Make: Electronics book & component kit to learn), what are the options when you want to have two pieces of hardware communicate inside a house? - Bluetooth - limited range? - Wifi - requires you to join each piece to the network, seems a hassle/expensive for simple electronics. - Xbee - expensive! - RF transmitter/receiver - seems cheap, but maybe distance is limited and there may be a lot of noise? Anything else?

andrey_utkin 10y ago
You didn't mention wires. And I think it's worth considering. Most probably your sensor is going to be connected to power plug (if it goes detached). So why not to situate mini-server (RPi-alike) nearby, with a sensor connected by wire?
- impostervt 10y ago
  Not sure I follow. The door sensor is going to be hanging on my daughter's door, and the alarm would be in my room, probably 40 ft away.
  - andrey_utkin 10y ago
    Wherever you place the sensor, it most probably needs power supply. Batteries die, so I'd go with plugging into power socket. Since we use a nearby (to daughter's door) power socket, we could insert _right_there_ a mini-PC to control the sensor (because sensor just senses, and you need some "digital brain" to do something with results of sensing). Then mini-PC could notify you in a lot of possible ways.
slig 10y ago
Look up the ESP8266. It's a very cheap piece of hardware that you can program using the Arduino IDE. It can connect to your local WiFi easily and send a push notification to your phone. So you can build something like this using a simple PIR sensor + ESP8266.

dekhn 10y ago

If you want to play with Bluetooth Low Energy and devices, your best bet is the Arduino 101. It includes BLE and a nice, simple API to handle BLE characteristics. Combine the 101 with a MOSFET attached to digital pins, running the BLEFirmata sketch, and you can remotely control a number of high-power LEDs from your phone.

StavrosK 10y ago

What a coincidence, I just finished making my wifi-controlled RGB LED strip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg I'm currently writing this up, but I'm loving the fact that I can integrate it with games, and I want to add some more. Next goal is for my living room's lighting to pulse orange or blue depending on which team scores in Rocket League. If anyone knows how I can hook into the game to get various pieces of info, please let me know.

joshgel 10y ago

Here is someone else who reverse engineered a slightly more complicated WiFi based protocol: https://github.com/beville/flux_led https://github.com/beville/flux_led. It's pretty well done, though he also has these magic numbers around that he couldn't quite figure out what they were there for. I used this and hacked an amazon button to control my home lighting and it works great. All these seems like more argument to standardized IoT.

post_break 10y ago

I love my Wifi lifx bulbs. Amazing output, low latency, and the standby usage is 0.7w when off. My biggest complaint is there is no physical switch to turn them on and off. Using my phone is slower than a switch, and if I switch them off they won't be able to come back on with my phone or IFTTT schedule. 0.7w seems low to me for standby.

stephengillie 10y ago
What if wall switches were replaced by very simple phones...or even watches. It would effectively be running the one app all of the time, defaulted to the lights in the room. There could even be some sort of hard-wire bus between this switch and the bulbs, to communicate through RF interference.
- jmiserez 10y ago
  Or just use something like the Philips Hue Tap [1], which sends an RF signal (ZigBee) solely using the energy from your button press (no batteries). [1] http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-switch http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-...
  - post_break 10y ago
    I wish this would work with LIFX. I refuse to go to Hue but man I want a physical switch.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  With the drastic price fall of Android tablets (mostly the Amazon Fire) - there have been a few enterprising people that have hacked them into basically being "smart switches" for their homes. The results are still a little too janky for my taste but the costs are getting there.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  This is what I do. I use my old android phones, on a dedicated network. I'm also building a RPI kiosk to manage them

Girlang 10y ago

We've been using WiFi lightbulbs. Even easier. Of course, I don't trust them on my real WiFi network (they are from China) so I set up a separate network just for them. The advantage is they're easy to talk to and have a great range.

floch 10y ago

i've been tinkering with the misfit bolt which is a bluetooth bulb, and some fella (@fayep) posted that on my GH repo last week: http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_interface_v1.0.pdf http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_inter... - this seems to be common to several implementation of bluetooth bulbs as the bolt works with these specs. couple implementations for these: https://github.com/fayep/bolt https://github.com/fayep/bolt, https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue, https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt (last one is mine, largely inspired by the two above)