8 ms·
Reset C by GE Light Bulbs [video]
- fortran77 7y agoIs this really the best way they could come up with? I do understand the problem though. And why did they change the pattern between firmware versions? Were they getting false hits, or was it just too hard to do? This is a lightbulb! Who is the intended audience. The Internet of Things really isn't ready for the general public.
- seren 7y agoAs a software guy working on embedded systems, working with HW guys, more often than not the SW is always considered "free" while the cost of the BOM is always scrutinized to the cent. I am pretty sure in this instance the initial design had a reset button, and someone had the great idea to remove it to gain a few cents. Be sure that the people working are sure this is a really poor design, but often cost considerations trump common sense.
- bdamm 7y agoMy bets are that the firmware developers never had a problem because they're JTAG'd, simulated, or running insecure firmware with a built-in back door, and it wasn't until late in the product cycle where the need was even discovered (likely by a QA team.) At that point, this is the best they could come up with.
- seren 7y agoThis could also be possible and more charitable for the poor HW guys I have denigrated, but at some point, someone (Product Manager?) has decided to go ahead with that weird pattern, which seems a bit odd.
- pkaye 7y agoThis got a lot of attention on the internet for its sheer complexity recently. The second pattern is the older one and a little more complicated than the first. The problem is there is no place to put a reset switch on the bulb while it is plugged in. However I've seen similar things with resetting stuff like key remote on cars.
- Dylan16807 7y agoUnless something is deeply wrong with the design, the intended audience is "almost nobody". How often have you had to reset a device to factory default? I've only done it as part of changing the OS on a router.
- chupa-chups 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20242805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20242805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20244885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20244885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20235376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20235376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20235221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20235221
- tntn 7y agowhat is the point of linking to submissions with no discussion.
- foobarbecue 7y agoI really thought this was a parody.
- codetrotter 7y agoYeah it’s actually hilarious. It’s like something straight out of an Adult Swim show. Cheerful music, complicated and obviously error prone procedure, narrator that sounds really happy about what they’ve done here. The added text in the description about the firmware version. Life is stranger than fiction sometimes. I love it. Oh and I’m never buying GE smart bulbs lol.
- didgeoridoo 7y agoAll I could think of was The IT Crowd: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
- morpheuskafka 7y agoWas it really to expensive to add a cheap button? It's not like it needs to be pressed more than once or twice per product lifetime.
- Xylakant 7y agoI don’t own any smart lightbulbs, but my flat’s ceiling is at about 3,90m and getting a ladder out for every reset would be tedious. This would work without.
- notatoad 7y agoI have some GE smart lightbulbs and i've never needed to reset them. People seem eager to mock this, but i don't see the problem. it's a (hopefully) rarely used procedure that you wouldn't want to be accidentally triggered, on an item that's very price sensitive. A physical reset button would significantly add to the cost of a part that sells for <$15. If anything, be happy that GE has not only engineered a reset procedure, but they also publish it. The most likely alternative to this is not a button but rather no published reset at all, and just call the part disposable.
- shakna 7y agoHowever, they recognised the complexity of the reset process, and that customers may have a more-significant-than-none need for a reset. (A simple example that occurred to me: Lost/destroyed phone). This video was the result. A professionally filmed video, even with low needs such as this one, also come with significant costs, as well as the PR fallout when people realise it's absurdly complicated compared to pressing a button with a toothpick. (As well as the support fielding they may have to end up doing). The BOM cost of the hardware in the bulb is closely accounted for in most products like this, but it seems the cost savings on the BOM weren't accounted for elsewhere.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jarfil 7y agoA surface mounted switch and a tiny hole in the casing would be easy and cheap... but it would ruin waterproofing, which would make the bulb unsuitable for places like a bathroom. That's probably too big of a market to lose just to simplify a reset procedure that will rarely be used.
- kalleboo 7y agoThe hole method become a problem when your only fixtures are embedded/in the ceiling and you can’t reach it. Some people will end up using a metal hairpin... next to an live, exposed Edison socket Some LED lights also get quite warm
- beering 7y agoI don't see why this is so bad. You just have to follow along with the video for ~1 min. and depending on your lighting setup, it allows you to reset many lights at once without getting a ladder or stepstool and physically poking each one.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe person in the video actually doesn't follow the timing precisely, repeatedly turning the bulb off after ~7 - 7.5 seconds. I wonder what tolerances are on timing in the firmware?
- jjoonathan 7y agoLabeled Buttons >> Unlabeled Hieroglyphs >> Morse Code Button >> Morse Code Side Channel Why do I so often find products where the designers have chosen a less usable option even though size constraints would have easily permitted a more usable option? Here it's debatable, but every time I find a desktop app / website that has replaced labeled buttons with hieroglyphs in a hamburger menu I die a little inside. Also, while this light bulb is bad, I feel like bluetooth earbuds still take the cake for having the worst interfaces. They combine the undiscoverable and difficult-to-actuate morse code button with a slow, obtuse interactive voice menu and bluetooth's unreliability and incompatibility to create a modern interaction hell like no other.
- gumby 7y ago>Labeled Buttons >> Unlabeled Hieroglyphs >> Morse Code Button >> Morse Code Side Channel > Why do I so often find products where the designers have chosen a less usable option even though size constraints would have easily permitted a more usable option? I assume the designers were responding to management's insistence of reducing BOM costs. And by "designer" we're talking about EEs -- high volume low-cost hardware applications rarely have any UI team at all.
- alkonaut 7y agoStop buying smart bulbs. It’s an absolutely horrible idea from beginning to end. What people want is a way to switch a lamp on and off. For that you need a smart switch. For it to work you can’t have a dumb switch in your wall first - because when the dumb switch is in the “off” position, the smart lightbulb doesn’t work! What do people that buy smart bulbs do, tape their light switches in the “on” position so you can no longer use the most convenient way to switch off? Or do they eventually get a smart switch also thereby removing the need for a smart bulb (yes I know there is things like dimming and rgb, but let’s face it the killer application of smartness is switching). If someone had pitched the hue to me 20 years ago I would have laughed. But apparently I misjudged what people want - so why are they popular? Has anyone met everyone that said “I switched all my bulbs to smart ones with dumb switches and it’s great”? Sorry for the rant but I just feel that this isn’t what’s stupid about smart bulbs. The idea itself is fundamentally flawed or I completely missed the point.
- Hamuko 7y agoI have a button on my keyboard (F16) that turns on every smart light in my apartment. I also have a button on my keyboard (F17) that turns on the two lights in my "bedroom" in red colour and then fades them out in five minutes. This allows me to still see around when I turn off the monitor, but doesn't require me to go hit the light switches in the bedroom before and after.
- frogpelt 7y agoOk, but let's talk about your keyboard. Why does it have so many function keys?
- Hamuko 7y agoIt's just a standard full-sized Apple keyboard. Nineteen (19) function keys. And since the small Apple keyboards only have twelve (12) function keys, you can use them pretty freely to bind your own stuff.
- segmondy 7y ago
- TeMPOraL 7y agoFor people who actually need to do this, there is an automated solution available: https://hackaday.io/project/166216-ge-smart-lightbulb-reseter https://hackaday.io/project/166216-ge-smart-lightbulb-resete... h/t @deshipu (the author) over at Mastodon.
- stevebmark 7y agoWhich episode of SNL did this air on? Hilarious writing
- Theodores 7y agoDo people buy smart lightbulbs these days? Is there any innovation to drive sales? In the olden days they would be part of your weekly shop, somewhere in the house a bulb would need replacing or you would be running low on them. Maybe 'weekly shop' is overstating it, but you wouldn't want to be without a spare bulb on hand. All of those filament bulbs have been replaced. The lights you have are the lights you have. People that wanted the smart bulbs must have got them by now, old timers who don't care for such things are not going to get them. The old user interface of the switch on the wall is what most people want. The idea of having to get your phone out to turn on a light isn't of appeal to those okay with the existing arrangements. This is particularly so in the world of light pollution where it is never truly dark in built up areas. I notice some people in the comments talk about replacing all the bulbs to smart bulbs. In America it is okay to just do this but in more frugal parts of the world there would be the aspect of waste to consider - never mind expense. Ad-hoc replacement of filament bulbs that blow with novelty smart bulbs is one thing but chucking out perfectly fit for purpose bulbs to get smart bulbs isn't how people do things outside America. Exceptions to this are when getting a new house but the housing market is kaput at the moment in most of Europe. How is this smart bulb market going? Has it reached a plateau with everyone who wants them having them and the market declining? Or are these new bulbs that don't need a Hue base station making it happen?
- throwaway34241 7y agoI've had these bulbs and done this reset process more times than I can count. For years the software was some of the worst I've ever used. It would constantly lose pairing with the bulbs. In order to re-pair with the bulbs, all the bulbs had to be reset individually using this process, and then all configuration had to be deleted from the app and every bulb needed to be re-added as a new bulb. Pairing was error-prone. Firmware updates would constantly fail. Not only that, but initially the software didn't even support turning them on or changing the color on a schedule, despite the hardware being capable of it (they added the feature later). If basic things like schedules don't work what is even the point of smart bulbs? Looking at this error message from the app [1] might give you an idea of how sloppy their SW was. This isn't from the first version either. After they added schedules it was a bit better since you could just set one and not touch it. And after years they've fixed some of the major bugs. I still think smart lights are useful. Setting the lights to turn on in the morning (as a substitute for an alarm clock) is very nice, as well as changing to a warmer color temperature in the evening. But switches are superior to phones for just turning the lights on and off IMO. I think an ideal smart light system would use switches to turn them on and set brightness/color temperature, and only use the phone for advanced things like scheduling. [1] https://imgur.com/a/Uauynh6 https://imgur.com/a/Uauynh6
- justwalt 7y agoOh my goodness. Why did you put up with that for so long? Surely there are other bulbs that are just as capable and don't come with this ridiculous software.
- Hamuko 7y agoMaybe my Hue lights are not that expensive in retrospect.
- delusional 7y agoIkea's smart lights have some switch like buttons you can use to turn on and off the lights (you can also adjust the brightness by holding down the buttons). It's pretty nice to be able to just place those little buttons wherever you think you want to turn on the lights.
- salex89 7y agoWas a pinhole reset button so hard to implement?
- foobarbecue 7y agoYeah, it would be. You want the user to stick their hand up in a lamp, with the power on? And try to poke a button with a sharp metal object? I suppose you could add a big capacitor or battery so that it could be reset when not in the lamp, but that is non-trivial.
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoPerhaps you could use an on/off switch, and do something like this. function power_on() { bool sw_pos_last = eeprom_read(SWITCH_LASTBOOT); bool sw_pos_now = input_read(SWITCH); if (sw_pos_last != sw_pos_now) { eeprom_write(SWITCH_LASTBOOT, sw_pos_now); factory_reset(); } } To reset, simply turn it off, press the switch, turn it on, done! No power is needed to latch a reset request when the bulb is disconnected. Seems easy and straightforward, at worst you need to power the bulb on/off several times. > I suppose you could add a big capacitor or battery so that it could be reset when not in the lamp, but that is non-trivial. Even if you go this way with only a momentary switch, it's not trivial, but I don't think it's rocket science either, just an example to make the point: using a flip-flop and a 100 uF capacitor, with an isolated Vcc supply (can be supplied by the MCU). The flip-flop draws 1 mA of current at 5 volt, you press a reset switch to invert the flip-flop, when the bulb is turned on later, the MCU would read a different state and trigger the factory reset. 100 uF would give the user at least 2 minutes to react, assuming the worst capacitor. To detect the power loss of the flip-flop, use a comparator before MCU reapplies the power, the cost is less than 1 USD, and I bet the electronics engineers can come up with a even better solution.
- foobarbecue 7y agoWell that's a very good design.
- tzs 7y agoOT: I've noticed that my local Walmart has the GE bulbs. They are over in the lighting section, out on the shelves with the non-smart bulbs. If you want them, you just toss them in your cart and go pay for them at the regular checkout. They also have smart bulbs by Philips, TP-Link/Kasa, and Merkury Innovations--and all of these are in a locked display over in the electronics section. If you want them, you have to find an employee in electronics to unlock the display and grab them for you, and then you have to pay for them at the checkout in electronics. They won't let you just toss them in your cart and pay at the regular checkout. Finally, they also have some Monster smart light products, which are in the electronics section, but not in a locked display, so you can buy them without assistance. I have not been able to figure out any good reason for the different smart bulbs to be in different sections like this, or for some to be locked up and some not.
- Animats 7y agoUp, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start.
- knockSequence 7y agoSomehow, when GE robs you of less than a minute of your life using a magic knock interface that would enthrall players in a video game, it feels like they still manage to age you by two decades with consumer hostile psychological warfare.
- karmakaze 7y ago> ...the software... I thought it was already bad when our DVRs, TVs, cars and personal electronics take time to 'boot' because they're running OSes. Now were at the point where we'll put software into just about anything and deal with the fallout. The IoT age is about to be a very inconvenient one.
- alcrastaz 7y agoCant use these bulbs for light signaling!!