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The only lighting system I've experienced in a very, very expensive home was kind of hilariously bad. One person turning on the whole house's lights at 3am, hav

by gefh 13y ago

The only lighting system I've experienced in a very, very expensive home was kind of hilariously bad. One person turning on the whole house's lights at 3am, having to wave at a sensor every 5 minutes while reading - made me think dumb switches weren't such a bad idea.

seszett 13y ago
I'm working in a recent building with no lightswitches. Since writing code doesn't involve a lot of movement, I have to wave at the sensor every so often when it goes dark. And the whole building was built to host IT companies, so it's a problem for nearly everyone. There are few things as annoying as that.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  You could try rigging a cheap metronome to the sensor. Or even an led that lights every few minutes.
  - seszett 13y ago
    We managed to get hold of some kind of remote that's supposed to disable the sensor for two hours (though it's difficult to actually test, since there's no feedback at all when pressing it). Since we're already using a Raspberry Pi for other purposes, I have the project of decoding the remote's protocol and driving an infrared led from one of the RPI's GPIO ports.
    - mcpherrinm 13y ago
      At Mozilla's mountain view office, the lights automatically turn off at night. To keep them on, you have to call a phone number and punch in what floor you are on. But of course this was annoying because you weren't always near a phone or aware of the number, so there is an intranet website that uses some VoIP service to phone the building controller to keep the lights on.
- dsr_ 13y ago
  circa 1999, GTE Internetworking (which had been BBN and would be part of Verizon later) moved to a new office building in Burlington, MA. There were several design failures there (the carpet patterns had moire effects, the main corridor was curved so that you could not see what was up ahead) and the biggest failure was the automatic motion-sensing light switches in every office. They were designed to save money, because nobody would forget to turn off the lights. They did an excellent job of keeping people in the dark, partially because of the above sensor problem -- typing on a keyboard doesn't provide enough movement to trigger the sensors -- and partially because of their incredibly high failure rate. At about $50 per sensor module installed, they had to keep an electrician on full-time replacing sensors. I heard that eventually they stopped relying on trouble tickets and just swept the building over about a two week cycle. Meanwhile, people bought lights that they could control by themselves. Many of them were halogens running on 150 to 450W. Failed all the way around.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Motorised moving object on a microcontroller, perhaps?

by gefh 13y ago

seszett 13y ago

I'm working in a recent building with no lightswitches. Since writing code doesn't involve a lot of movement, I have to wave at the sensor every so often when it goes dark. And the whole building was built to host IT companies, so it's a problem for nearly everyone. There are few things as annoying as that.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
You could try rigging a cheap metronome to the sensor. Or even an led that lights every few minutes.
- seszett 13y ago
  We managed to get hold of some kind of remote that's supposed to disable the sensor for two hours (though it's difficult to actually test, since there's no feedback at all when pressing it). Since we're already using a Raspberry Pi for other purposes, I have the project of decoding the remote's protocol and driving an infrared led from one of the RPI's GPIO ports.
  - mcpherrinm 13y ago
    At Mozilla's mountain view office, the lights automatically turn off at night. To keep them on, you have to call a phone number and punch in what floor you are on. But of course this was annoying because you weren't always near a phone or aware of the number, so there is an intranet website that uses some VoIP service to phone the building controller to keep the lights on.
dsr_ 13y ago
circa 1999, GTE Internetworking (which had been BBN and would be part of Verizon later) moved to a new office building in Burlington, MA. There were several design failures there (the carpet patterns had moire effects, the main corridor was curved so that you could not see what was up ahead) and the biggest failure was the automatic motion-sensing light switches in every office. They were designed to save money, because nobody would forget to turn off the lights. They did an excellent job of keeping people in the dark, partially because of the above sensor problem -- typing on a keyboard doesn't provide enough movement to trigger the sensors -- and partially because of their incredibly high failure rate. At about $50 per sensor module installed, they had to keep an electrician on full-time replacing sensors. I heard that eventually they stopped relying on trouble tickets and just swept the building over about a two week cycle. Meanwhile, people bought lights that they could control by themselves. Many of them were halogens running on 150 to 450W. Failed all the way around.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Motorised moving object on a microcontroller, perhaps?