16 ms·

The anatomy of a smart bulb

101 points by mariuz 3y ago

MostlyStable 3y ago
Other than as an interesting hobby project to see if you can do it (which is completely valid, I've absolutely done projects that, from a practical perspective don't make sense but I learned lot in the process), this doesn't seem worth it. Unless there are literally no open source Wifi smart bulbs, even after you fix this one, this cheap AliExpress bulb almost definitely has terrible heat management that will kill it far faster than an LED bulb actually should die (which seems to be a problem among cheap LED bulbs more generally and I can't imagine is better in smart bulbs). If anyone has any experience with this though, I'd love to hear about it.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  I bought some "Kauf" model light bulbs about a year and a half ago in a direct quest to get something "HomeAssistant Only" The "RGB" color reproduction is...poor and the illumination they offer is a bit middling. But the biggest issue I had was the things would simply die after a while! I'd get maybe 3-4 months before they'd start flickering, then eventually stop entirely Thankfully since you can only buy either 1 or 4 packs I had plenty of spares, but I have to admit I've since retreated from the idea of "smart bulbs" for now
  - monocasa 3y ago
    Yeah, there's a lot of awful bulbs out there at the moment. Poor heat dissipation really does a number on the LEDs and smoothing capacitors.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Given how frequently even high end LEDs die I’m sure the cheap ones have to be really overdriven.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - sprobertson 3y ago
    On the other end of the price/quality spectrum, I have Hues that are still going strong after 6+ years of daily use. You can use them hub-free in HA using a ZigBee dongle.
- adfm 3y ago
  I built the original WiFi light bulb back in 2003. Does that count? https://web.archive.org/web/20090923154300/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/352 https://web.archive.org/web/20090923154300/http://www.oreill... Coincidentally, this post and another post[^1] about the cantenna[^2], something I built with old friends back in 2001, are currently on the HN front page. Random and fun! [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37826256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37826256 [^2]: https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can-antenna-turns-10/ https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can...
spdustin 3y ago
The Zigbee answer would’ve been to use Zigbee Group Messaging to group the lights together so that all seven bulbs respond to a single command, rather than having to send a Zigbee packet seven times. But I do enjoy de-Tuya-ing no-name bulbs. Now that ESPHome has merged Beken support, it’s even easier. I’ve been able to un-crap dozens of cheap WiFi smart bulbs so satisfying to have them running ESPHome.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  a lot of esoteric words here. is there some documentation to this setup? I'm not sure where to even start, but don't want Govee relentlessly forcing me to give them my location to use smart bulbs
redundantly 3y ago
I wish I could get bulbs that are easily repairable. Zigbee bulbs I bought ~7 years ago have started failing in a very specific way, the smart functionality stops working intermittently then entirely, but they work fine as dumb bulbs after that point. I'd like to see bulbs that can be assembled by hand in order: socket, controller, LEDs, enclosure. This way if any one part fails I only need to replace that part. Parts that have failed can be sent back and recycled.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  >I'd like to see bulbs that can be assembled by hand in order: socket, controller, LEDs, enclosure. I'll bet you dollars that none of those things are failing. It's very likely capacitors. To make these cost effective, they have AC/DC converters and aren't putting a ton of love into SMPS buck switching. They're choosing the cheapest components pushed to their limits. Or, just plain don't care at all. The rated hours of a typical electrolytic cap is something like 2000 hours at it's rating and at 20ºC which these are not. So if you need more than that you over-rate it. But that's expensive, and someone will look at it and say "You have 12VAC, you can buy a 16V cap and that's all". Without too fine a point on the underlying issue... Stop buying future-trash made by people that really don't care what they're making.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > "You have 12VAC, you can buy a 16V cap and that's all" 12VAC has an RMS measure of 12 volts but a peak voltage of ~17V. (I'm not saying that no one's done exactly that, but when they did, they were operating outside the rating in the first 1/120th of a second of operation.)
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      I threw numbers out. But in many applications in many circuits with many aluminum electrolytics that would still be fine. It's tantalums that you super-duper do not ever exceed the rated voltage of, and double that for reverse polarity.
- 3y ago
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Does anyone remember when lightbulbs were a thin glass bubble and a piece of wire? Compare that in a landfill to this thing. Something that is effectively gone in 10 years if crushed and left outside vs this that many part will look the same in 1000. I guess I enjoy the extreme hypocritical nature of "smart home" things from people that talk about climate change and living wages and etc. You're buying future-landfill trash from slaves because you think it's neat that your lights are on timers.... On the other hand, to be fair... I have "dumb" LEDs that I like (Reveals because I know what color should look like) and obviously there is a break-even point of not spending 95% of your power in heat when you want it for light. It's really just the "smart" parts that I find just so unnecessary.
- berbec 3y ago
  I prefer smart light switches to smart bulbs myself. It seems like a cleaner, less wasteful way of getting what i really want - the ability to turn lights on and off from an app/through voice. Putting all this circuitry into a bulb with a limited lifespan seems silly to me, like the old TV/VCR combos. When I used to sell televisions we always steered people away from those because invariably one would fail before the other, making the device far less useful.
- kcb 3y ago
  Those light bulbs took like 10x the power for the same amount of light and dumped 100ws of heat to light a room in a time you might be trying to cool it. I don't think there's any reasonable way to argue incandescent light bulbs as the environmentally friendly option.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Depends if you are calculating the costs in the summer or the winter. My point is you are comparing to cheap garbage that took components and rare metals from around the world shipped on tankers to China where they were produced in harmful conditions, then shipped back around the world where they work for a year and are thrown in the landfill to sit for 1000. The cost of those lightbulbs is not nearly as easy as the efficiency sticker on the box.
Roark66 3y ago
I'm really disappointed with all the LED lights I tried (except one brand that doesn't exist anymore). Led lights were supposed to last 10 years at 8h per day. Initially they were expensive, but it was possible to get LEDs of good quality. 7 years ago when I was building my house I bought 100 gu10 7W 550 lumen cool white "halogen style" 240V led lights. In these 7 years I replaced around 16. Many of these lights are used 16+ h/day. I'm very happy with them. Unfortunately the brand dissappeared (it was a reseller brand). Since then ever single LED I bought failed with a year or two. Big outdoor led floodlights 25W,50W and few 100W. Every single one fails in a couple of months. They're not even used that much as they have PIRs, maybe they are on 20min per day. Then there are E17 lights I bought for a small workshop (12 of them). None lasted over 6 months (used few hours per week in an unheated workshop). I'm not even buying the cheapest LEDs. It's the same regardless if I pay for "premium" or the cheapest. I have so many broken LEDs I started fixing them. I have a hot air soldering station and a pcb heating tool. They always fail the same way. One of the LEDs is burned. Why? Because they are driven too hard that's why. If they were driven with 10% less power they would have a chance to last.
- nunez 3y ago
  Interesting. Some of our TP-Link/Kasa bulbs are going on seven years of operation. Shits have been bulletproof for us.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  I wonder if the vendors or suppliers know?
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    It seems like a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons I'm sure they know.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    For sure they do. I spoke about these floodlights with the people in the shop I bought them at and they had a representative of the supplier come every month in a van to collect all the dead ones and give them new ones. I can't understand how they could sell them at such low price, replace 40%, and still make a profit. Perhaps they fix them themselves?
eande 3y ago
It always irks me when I see these low cost electrolytic capacitors. With operation hours they dry out loose capacitance and typically are the first components to make the bulb worthless. There are long life, high temp electrolytic cap, but from the picture I can tell these ain't the one and due to competition and fierce price competition won't allow to add in several more cents to make the bulbs last additional 50k/100K/ or more hours. Maybe also not good for reoccurring business. What a waste.
- gumby 3y ago
  Good point: if you’re going to all this effort to reflash the devices anyway you might as well upgrade the caps.
bhouston 3y ago
I much prefer smart switches over smart bulbs. Because smart switches always work with you flip them physically whether the network is down or not. Also smart switches ensure that there is no mismatch between physical switch state and light bulb state. Before I moved over to smart switches exclusively I had some Philips smart bulbs with wireless switches - it was the most unreliable and finicky setup I ever had. The only smart thing in a light bulb should be it ability to change color.
- nunez 3y ago
  Smart switches are great but you can beat color changing smart bulbs especially given how cheap they are now.
- constantly 3y ago
  I have the Phillips Wiz and they work fine without internet, just need to be on the same wifi network. They also work with no network at all, directly with the switch, but lack ability to make new changes to things like brightness or color, and instead only work with the details user-set settings or the secondary user-set settings, which are accessed by flipping the switch twice. I think this is fair. It’s not as if nothing works, they basically revert to dumb bulbs in the absence of wifi, or dumbish bulbs that only remember the two defaults the user had set.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  The bulbs can do redshift (going from cold to warm white in the evening), but I agree about the switches... especially if you turn the (ordinary) switch on the wall off, no "smartness" in the bulb can then turn it on if it's unpowered :)
- ellisv 3y ago
  I use smart dimmer switches for overhead lights and smart bulbs for lamps.
- ojkelly 3y ago
  Interestingly I’ve had Phillips Hue for well over 5 years now, but no smart switches. One of the bigger QoL improvements I’ve ever made, especially when the lights automatically change throughout the day. Between a few specifically named scenes in the Home app, Siri on HomePods, and the normal switches it’s been quite reliable. Worst case if the internet is down (which stops Siri’s voice to text), or if there’s a wifi issue, or if I’m right next to a switch: I can turn the switch off, wait 2 seconds, turn on and the hue light turns on to a neutral color at a reasonable brightness. I think any combination of smart lights or switches or both is manageable as long as you have a fast, simple means to power cycle the lights (and they default-on with power). I don’t think dumb light switches should disappear. They’re phenomenally reliable, have a predictable behaviour, are easily discoverable and never move. The last one is important because when you urgently need to turn a light on, nothing beats a dumb switch.
3guk 3y ago
For anyone interested in more of this sort of stuff - including ways to modify some brands so they are not being driven as hard, it's always worth to check out Big Clive on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
accrual 3y ago
> all of the light controls is handled thru PWMs. > allows the module to be powered and the other ones allow the control of the PWMs. Does this refer to pulse width modulation? If these are PWM bulbs I'd suggest staying away from them at any cost.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Pretty much all dimmable LEDs found in stores are dimmed using PWM. The flickering is caused by cheap controllers using low frequency PWM.
  - suzumer 3y ago
    This isn't necessarily true. I tried to measure the PWM of my Cree and Philips smart bulbs, and what I found is that for RGB mode, they used PWM, but for white mode (which appears to use a 2700k led and 6500k led) they current dim both leds, and then use PWM to pulse the warm and cool leds on and off to achieve the target warmth. The Philips bulb actually syncs this so while the warm led is on, the cool led is off, and vice versa, so even though there is flicker, the total lumens eminating from the bulb is constant.

101 points by mariuz 3y ago

Other than as an interesting hobby project to see if you can do it (which is completely valid, I've absolutely done projects that, from a practical perspective don't make sense but I learned lot in the process), this doesn't seem worth it. Unless there are literally no open source Wifi smart bulbs, even after you fix this one, this cheap AliExpress bulb almost definitely has terrible heat management that will kill it far faster than an LED bulb actually should die (which seems to be a problem among cheap LED bulbs more generally and I can't imagine is better in smart bulbs). If anyone has any experience with this though, I'd love to hear about it.

IntelMiner 3y ago
I bought some "Kauf" model light bulbs about a year and a half ago in a direct quest to get something "HomeAssistant Only" The "RGB" color reproduction is...poor and the illumination they offer is a bit middling. But the biggest issue I had was the things would simply die after a while! I'd get maybe 3-4 months before they'd start flickering, then eventually stop entirely Thankfully since you can only buy either 1 or 4 packs I had plenty of spares, but I have to admit I've since retreated from the idea of "smart bulbs" for now
- monocasa 3y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of awful bulbs out there at the moment. Poor heat dissipation really does a number on the LEDs and smoothing capacitors.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Given how frequently even high end LEDs die I’m sure the cheap ones have to be really overdriven.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- sprobertson 3y ago
  On the other end of the price/quality spectrum, I have Hues that are still going strong after 6+ years of daily use. You can use them hub-free in HA using a ZigBee dongle.
adfm 3y ago
I built the original WiFi light bulb back in 2003. Does that count? https://web.archive.org/web/20090923154300/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/352 https://web.archive.org/web/20090923154300/http://www.oreill... Coincidentally, this post and another post[^1] about the cantenna[^2], something I built with old friends back in 2001, are currently on the HN front page. Random and fun! [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37826256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37826256 [^2]: https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can-antenna-turns-10/ https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can...

spdustin 3y ago

The Zigbee answer would’ve been to use Zigbee Group Messaging to group the lights together so that all seven bulbs respond to a single command, rather than having to send a Zigbee packet seven times. But I do enjoy de-Tuya-ing no-name bulbs. Now that ESPHome has merged Beken support, it’s even easier. I’ve been able to un-crap dozens of cheap WiFi smart bulbs so satisfying to have them running ESPHome.

hackernewds 3y ago
a lot of esoteric words here. is there some documentation to this setup? I'm not sure where to even start, but don't want Govee relentlessly forcing me to give them my location to use smart bulbs

redundantly 3y ago

I wish I could get bulbs that are easily repairable. Zigbee bulbs I bought ~7 years ago have started failing in a very specific way, the smart functionality stops working intermittently then entirely, but they work fine as dumb bulbs after that point. I'd like to see bulbs that can be assembled by hand in order: socket, controller, LEDs, enclosure. This way if any one part fails I only need to replace that part. Parts that have failed can be sent back and recycled.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
>I'd like to see bulbs that can be assembled by hand in order: socket, controller, LEDs, enclosure. I'll bet you dollars that none of those things are failing. It's very likely capacitors. To make these cost effective, they have AC/DC converters and aren't putting a ton of love into SMPS buck switching. They're choosing the cheapest components pushed to their limits. Or, just plain don't care at all. The rated hours of a typical electrolytic cap is something like 2000 hours at it's rating and at 20ºC which these are not. So if you need more than that you over-rate it. But that's expensive, and someone will look at it and say "You have 12VAC, you can buy a 16V cap and that's all". Without too fine a point on the underlying issue... Stop buying future-trash made by people that really don't care what they're making.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  > "You have 12VAC, you can buy a 16V cap and that's all" 12VAC has an RMS measure of 12 volts but a peak voltage of ~17V. (I'm not saying that no one's done exactly that, but when they did, they were operating outside the rating in the first 1/120th of a second of operation.)
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    I threw numbers out. But in many applications in many circuits with many aluminum electrolytics that would still be fine. It's tantalums that you super-duper do not ever exceed the rated voltage of, and double that for reverse polarity.
3y ago

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

Does anyone remember when lightbulbs were a thin glass bubble and a piece of wire? Compare that in a landfill to this thing. Something that is effectively gone in 10 years if crushed and left outside vs this that many part will look the same in 1000. I guess I enjoy the extreme hypocritical nature of "smart home" things from people that talk about climate change and living wages and etc. You're buying future-landfill trash from slaves because you think it's neat that your lights are on timers.... On the other hand, to be fair... I have "dumb" LEDs that I like (Reveals because I know what color should look like) and obviously there is a break-even point of not spending 95% of your power in heat when you want it for light. It's really just the "smart" parts that I find just so unnecessary.

berbec 3y ago
I prefer smart light switches to smart bulbs myself. It seems like a cleaner, less wasteful way of getting what i really want - the ability to turn lights on and off from an app/through voice. Putting all this circuitry into a bulb with a limited lifespan seems silly to me, like the old TV/VCR combos. When I used to sell televisions we always steered people away from those because invariably one would fail before the other, making the device far less useful.
kcb 3y ago
Those light bulbs took like 10x the power for the same amount of light and dumped 100ws of heat to light a room in a time you might be trying to cool it. I don't think there's any reasonable way to argue incandescent light bulbs as the environmentally friendly option.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Depends if you are calculating the costs in the summer or the winter. My point is you are comparing to cheap garbage that took components and rare metals from around the world shipped on tankers to China where they were produced in harmful conditions, then shipped back around the world where they work for a year and are thrown in the landfill to sit for 1000. The cost of those lightbulbs is not nearly as easy as the efficiency sticker on the box.

Roark66 3y ago

I'm really disappointed with all the LED lights I tried (except one brand that doesn't exist anymore). Led lights were supposed to last 10 years at 8h per day. Initially they were expensive, but it was possible to get LEDs of good quality. 7 years ago when I was building my house I bought 100 gu10 7W 550 lumen cool white "halogen style" 240V led lights. In these 7 years I replaced around 16. Many of these lights are used 16+ h/day. I'm very happy with them. Unfortunately the brand dissappeared (it was a reseller brand). Since then ever single LED I bought failed with a year or two. Big outdoor led floodlights 25W,50W and few 100W. Every single one fails in a couple of months. They're not even used that much as they have PIRs, maybe they are on 20min per day. Then there are E17 lights I bought for a small workshop (12 of them). None lasted over 6 months (used few hours per week in an unheated workshop). I'm not even buying the cheapest LEDs. It's the same regardless if I pay for "premium" or the cheapest. I have so many broken LEDs I started fixing them. I have a hot air soldering station and a pcb heating tool. They always fail the same way. One of the LEDs is burned. Why? Because they are driven too hard that's why. If they were driven with 10% less power they would have a chance to last.

nunez 3y ago
Interesting. Some of our TP-Link/Kasa bulbs are going on seven years of operation. Shits have been bulletproof for us.
lostlogin 3y ago
I wonder if the vendors or suppliers know?
- _ea1k 3y ago
  It seems like a lemon market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons I'm sure they know.
- Roark66 3y ago
  For sure they do. I spoke about these floodlights with the people in the shop I bought them at and they had a representative of the supplier come every month in a van to collect all the dead ones and give them new ones. I can't understand how they could sell them at such low price, replace 40%, and still make a profit. Perhaps they fix them themselves?

eande 3y ago

It always irks me when I see these low cost electrolytic capacitors. With operation hours they dry out loose capacitance and typically are the first components to make the bulb worthless. There are long life, high temp electrolytic cap, but from the picture I can tell these ain't the one and due to competition and fierce price competition won't allow to add in several more cents to make the bulbs last additional 50k/100K/ or more hours. Maybe also not good for reoccurring business. What a waste.

gumby 3y ago
Good point: if you’re going to all this effort to reflash the devices anyway you might as well upgrade the caps.

bhouston 3y ago

I much prefer smart switches over smart bulbs. Because smart switches always work with you flip them physically whether the network is down or not. Also smart switches ensure that there is no mismatch between physical switch state and light bulb state. Before I moved over to smart switches exclusively I had some Philips smart bulbs with wireless switches - it was the most unreliable and finicky setup I ever had. The only smart thing in a light bulb should be it ability to change color.

nunez 3y ago
Smart switches are great but you can beat color changing smart bulbs especially given how cheap they are now.
constantly 3y ago
I have the Phillips Wiz and they work fine without internet, just need to be on the same wifi network. They also work with no network at all, directly with the switch, but lack ability to make new changes to things like brightness or color, and instead only work with the details user-set settings or the secondary user-set settings, which are accessed by flipping the switch twice. I think this is fair. It’s not as if nothing works, they basically revert to dumb bulbs in the absence of wifi, or dumbish bulbs that only remember the two defaults the user had set.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The bulbs can do redshift (going from cold to warm white in the evening), but I agree about the switches... especially if you turn the (ordinary) switch on the wall off, no "smartness" in the bulb can then turn it on if it's unpowered :)
ellisv 3y ago
I use smart dimmer switches for overhead lights and smart bulbs for lamps.
ojkelly 3y ago
Interestingly I’ve had Phillips Hue for well over 5 years now, but no smart switches. One of the bigger QoL improvements I’ve ever made, especially when the lights automatically change throughout the day. Between a few specifically named scenes in the Home app, Siri on HomePods, and the normal switches it’s been quite reliable. Worst case if the internet is down (which stops Siri’s voice to text), or if there’s a wifi issue, or if I’m right next to a switch: I can turn the switch off, wait 2 seconds, turn on and the hue light turns on to a neutral color at a reasonable brightness. I think any combination of smart lights or switches or both is manageable as long as you have a fast, simple means to power cycle the lights (and they default-on with power). I don’t think dumb light switches should disappear. They’re phenomenally reliable, have a predictable behaviour, are easily discoverable and never move. The last one is important because when you urgently need to turn a light on, nothing beats a dumb switch.

3guk 3y ago

For anyone interested in more of this sort of stuff - including ways to modify some brands so they are not being driven as hard, it's always worth to check out Big Clive on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

accrual 3y ago

> all of the light controls is handled thru PWMs. > allows the module to be powered and the other ones allow the control of the PWMs. Does this refer to pulse width modulation? If these are PWM bulbs I'd suggest staying away from them at any cost.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Pretty much all dimmable LEDs found in stores are dimmed using PWM. The flickering is caused by cheap controllers using low frequency PWM.
- suzumer 3y ago
  This isn't necessarily true. I tried to measure the PWM of my Cree and Philips smart bulbs, and what I found is that for RGB mode, they used PWM, but for white mode (which appears to use a 2700k led and 6500k led) they current dim both leds, and then use PWM to pulse the warm and cool leds on and off to achieve the target warmth. The Philips bulb actually syncs this so while the warm led is on, the cool led is off, and vice versa, so even though there is flicker, the total lumens eminating from the bulb is constant.