7 ms·

I totally get the spirit of what you're saying, but to be fair a good reliable automated light-system would have an analog fail-safe that allows you to operate

• tachyoff 9y ago
  I think the problem is that you don’t really need centralized lighting at home, and the solution is to use regular light switches. ;)
• Someone1234 9y ago
  That more or less describes how Philip's Hue works. If the hub died, the smart bulbs can still still be operated using the regular light switch. If the bulb is in standby (smart "off") just flip the switch twice to turn it on. Then it will act like a regular bulb until the hub returns. Hue only has one big defect with regards to this... If there's an electrical outage and the smart bulb is in standby, when power is restored the bulb will turn on. Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness. And as an aside, the nice thing about smartbulbs as a concept is that they require zero re-wiring or specialized wiring. So if the manufacturer of your bulbs went out of business or you wanted to change vendors, just replace the bulb and your work is done. Simple.
  • pfranz 9y ago
    I've seen televisions have that issue. They can come back on in the middle of the night. To me, this makes sense for a lightbulb. If your failsafe "backdoor" expects it to be wired to a switch, you would turn that switch off in the event of a power outage. What else would it do when the power comes back on? One thing I really like about "smart" things, when the power is out at home I can check my phone to see if power is restored. I guess that's similar to calling your home to see if the answering machine is back on.
  • aaronharnly 9y ago
    I have a couple dozen Hue lamps, and they regularly “reset” to full bright white, presumably after a flicker in power that is otherwise imperceptible. It happens on average once every couple of weeks, and is quite annoying! I wish the lamps had a nonvolatile memory so they’d return to their previous color and intensity... (I still love them and am happy I have them rather than regular LEDs though.)
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      This has been suggested many times and, as far as I can tell, Philips decided the current behaviour is best safety-wise (consider e.g. if your last preset had 1% intensity).
      • tjoff 9y ago
        Then reset it after three on/off cycles within 3 s, or something. But surely the controller iwll sort this out when it gets back online a minute later? So that everything comes on (annoying enough) but switched off within the minute? If not that is just outrageously bad and imo ruins the product completely.
        • toss1 9y ago
          Three on-off cycles in rapid succession is exactly what you get in non-urban electrical systems when a tree falls against a wire. The local breaker detects the short to ground and cuts out, then resets after a few seconds on the chance that the tree has continued it's fall to the ground. If there's still a short, it repeats, and after the third or fourth short->cutout (depending on the local utility settings), stays off on the assumption that the tree is well and truly hung up on the line and will need a crew to fix it. It's pretty common occurrence in many locales where I've lived.
      • criddell 9y ago
        But it's the least smart thing to do. They could at least put an option in the setting to maintain settings after brief power outages. We had a power flicker last week in the middle of the night and suddenly our bedroom lights were on 100% and our Echo was loudly complaining that the internet was gone. At 3am.
  • Max-q 9y ago
    > Hue only has one big defect with regards to this... If there's an electrical outage and the smart bulb is in standby, when power is restored the bulb will turn on. Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness I guess the reason you have to flip the switch twice, is to prevent this problem. Then, if you get an outage during the night, it should continue to be off...
    • mseebach 9y ago
      A power outage looks exactly like flipping the switch twice.
  • Shoue 9y ago
    You could potentially pair it with Home Assistant to restore the state of the lightbulbs to 'off', and ensure Home Assistant has backup power in case of an outage (it takes a while to boot on an RPi3 at least).
  • slavik81 9y ago
    A friend of mine has Hue lights in his bathroom. The fact that they operate like normal lights when the power is interrupted is the only reason that guests have any chance of succeeding in using the bathroom without instruction.
    • Shoue 9y ago
      He doesn't have a motion sensor? He could also potentially install a humidity sensor for cases like showers.
      • mrweasel 9y ago
        See, now it starts to become weird again. I just want the lights on in the bathroom, a motion sensor is an unneeded expense.
      • coldtea 9y ago
        Yeah, and robots with laser eyes scanning for people sitting on the crapper...
      • oldcynic 9y ago
        See, now then you have to provide instructions to guests to wave their arms around vigorously when the lights go off mid shave! (Just like we have to do every 30 mins in the office when there's 3 or fewer in.)
        • dilap 9y ago
          yeah, waving your arms around wildly when the lights suddenly go out is practically instinctual for many people now :-)
      • bhandziuk 9y ago
        This is so complicated. Especially for a bathroom where there is likely only one entrance, you're no more than 5 steps from the such at any one time and you only need to operate the lights when you enter/leave.
      • 9y ago
  • rkagerer 9y ago
    There are a few comments under here about lights that default to "ON" after a power loss. I'm not clear why manufacturers didn't spring for a few bytes of Flash memory on the device to store last state. If my BIOS can maintain the ON/OFF state of my computer after a power outage, I'm not clear why my light bulb can't.
    • isolli 9y ago
      The default setting after a power cut can be configured for Osram Lightify bulbs.
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness. That's the same with regular bulbs, so...
    • Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Dimmable, color adjustable bulbs (assuming they exist)? Oh. Didn't think so either: an analog dimmer will resume operation right where you left it, no spontaneous resets to 100%.
      • coldtea 9y ago
        No, regular bulbs without a dimmer. Like 99% of households use.
        • Piskvorrr 9y ago
          Indeed. Then it's restored to previous state (which could be "on" or "off"), not reset to "always on." Even my computer's BIOS could do that ("on power restored, turn on if that was the previous state, otherwise keep off") in 2000, is the smart lightbulb dumber than that? That's a very unfortunate level: smart just enough to be annoying, but not enough to be useful.
    • jdbernard 9y ago
      I've never had regular bulbs that were off turn on after a power outage.
  • aerophilic 9y ago
    While I love my hue bulbs, I have two main gripes (beyond cost) which have kept me from replacing all the bulbs in my house: 1. As good as they have gotten, they still aren’t nearly as instantaneous as a good old fashioned switch. Yes, there are ways to mitigate this, from having it decide when to turn on to alternative controls. But that latency really gets to me sometimes. 2. The system not recalling last state. If you are worried about not being able to default to lights being on, you can make it so that a quick toggle resets it. But I can be convinced of other options/opinions here. In general, I think the import point is how smart/dumb an object it is. It is more important how “rock solid” it is, and simple to use. I love the mantra “don’t make me think”. Devices should become “invisible” for the task you care about.
  • EADGBE 9y ago
    > Meaning if power goes out and is restored in the middle of the night the lights could suddenly turn on full brightness. I'm sorry but this is unacceptable. It's what keeps me from adopting Hue in my own home. My lighting system literally has one job, if an advancement of this technology can't keep analog reliability, I don't want it (That's a bug, not a feature). Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Hue, color changing bulbs, ability to remote control, ability to dim, etc. is awesome, but maybe should stay in a switch format if loss of power can't be handled correctly.
• kqr 9y ago
  It would be fairly natural to have a small three-way switch onto each light to select between "central control", "override on" and "manual override off", in that order. That way, you wouldn't have to shut down the entire system.
  • TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    It would, but it would also be expensive. Adding a switch changes the assembly process, requires extra firmware and testing, makes manufacture more complicated, demands localised labelling (unless you can work out a symbol system which maybe 50% of users won't get), and requires changes to the manual.
    • kqr 9y ago
      No doubt. This is why I think we need some sort of mandatory class-based reliability certification for a society of increasing IoT reliance. Not mandatory as in "you need to certify as at least class 3" but rather "you need to certify as some class of your choosing and clearly mark this on your packaging." The certification process should probably be cheap and flexible too. Maybe even let manufacturers self-certify the lower classes with heavy fines for abuse. That way, it would be more clear to the customer why the product with the physical stops and manual overrides is more expensive.
• pjc50 9y ago
  Our office has something like this: dimmable meeting room lights that are controlled by a single rocker switch. Since the only UI is "hold the switch down for longer or shorter periods, or press it repeatedly", and there are no written instructions and no discoverability, nobody can reliably work it and we routinely hold meetings in the dim half-light.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Same here, except sometimes lights will brighten and dim randomly during meetings. It's like living in Clamp Tower from Gremlins II.
  • Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Well that's your own damn fault for not RTFM! (Had that system at an office: it came with a manual of ~200 pages, but nobody wanted to learn the special variant of Morse code that the lights understood. Somehow we found the commands for "full on" and "full off", and the manual was abandoned. Seriously, 200 pages on operating a light? Technology making lives easier, riiiight there.)