I have a story on point. My brother is a manager at a company which installs electrical and HVAC systems, working mostly with very high-end private homes. They had this couple as clients, both very fancy architects, who designed their new home to be completely computer-controlled, from window shutters to air conditioners to lights, without any physical switches (I guess there was a remote and sensors or something). The architects had this theory that physical switches completely ruin the aesthetics of a room, and wouldn't abide having those horrible things in their dwelling. My brother says that he practically begged them to let him install backup physical switches - his proposal was that they would have a large panel in a closet somewhere with switches for everything in the house, which would still leave the switches hidden, but would at least make the house usable, if not very convenient, if the computer failed. But the clients insisted on no switches at all and the vendor of the computer system was willing to work with that, so that's what got built.
Anyway, about a month after the project got handed over, my brother gets a call: the computer had somehow worked itself into the state of "beyond fucked", the new computer brought by the vendor was refusing to talk to the controllers, parts were backordered, long story short, the house had been unlivable for a week with no end in sight, and could my brother come over and save it somehow. I think he was able to turn on a few of the most critical things on in manual mode, but obviously he couldn't wire up the hundreds of electrical devices in the house. Not sure what happened later.
Wait, so the preferred solution was a (presumably RF) remote and voice activation? So you've finished watching a movie, and now have to search the couch cushions just to turn the light on? Or you are going to the bathroom late at night and have to say "OK Google" loudly enough for the mic to hear you, possibly waking people up? Carrying around a portable lantern sounds more convenient.
Congratulations, somehow this house's lighting system is less ergonomic than my great-grandfather's house that was lit by kerosene lantern.
I wasn't there, but from what I understand, the whole place looked like a concept drawing from a magazine, and there was nothing as convenient or comfortable as a couch with actual cushions. So that's one problem solved. As for the bathroom, maybe an infrared volume sensor of some sort?
Someone tried to sell me Lutron Homeworks. It’s a computer to control lights and such. Want to add a new light switch? You need to reprogram it, and end users don’t get copies of the programming tool. Want to control lights if the computer dies? Nope.
"For some reason, GE decided not to install a physical reset button" Well, there might be some good reasons not to have a reset button. Without knowing GE's reasons let's brainstorm:
- My first thought is that many light bulbs are not easily accessible. They could be high up, or in a casing that requires a tool to open. So being able to reset them remotely is a practical benefit.
- If you google "accidents whilst changing light bulb" it seems that it's not impossible to injure or even kill yourself whilst changing a light bulb. So minimising the amount of times you need to physically access a light bulb has safety benefits.
- It is possible that the bulb is turned off but the power to it is still on. In that scenario getting a consumer to reach into a powered on light socket to press a button on the bulb, near the electrical connections, is not considered safe.
The fact that there is a logical chain of engineering considerations that got us to this point I take as granted (yes, the article thinks it could have been done better but, as you point out, there are safety problems).
But our world is becoming more and more like a Doglas Adams novel - I seem to remember in one of the H2G2 books that they considered their civilisation so advanced that they did away with TV remotes, and the TV could detect that you wanted to change channel when you make a gesture. The upshot being that if you didn't want the channel to change or the volume to suddenly shoot up, you had to sit completely rigidly still for the duration of your programme.
>A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
I like to watch Youtube videos about cars I can't afford, and Heart of Gold was exactly what I thought of when I saw that a recent BMW 7-series actually has gesture control.
I kind of do that to Spotify - I have to listen to tracks I don't necessarily like so that their suggestion mechanism would stop pushing me the same stuff I had already listened to.
PS: That being said, I would still listen to stuff I don't like to discover something, but that's beyond the point - wasn't automation supposed to make our lives better in some way? :)
We used to have a great solution for this: disk jockeys. Some stations still do employ them as actual curators of music, not just a pleasing voice over the Clear Channel Top 40 feed.
These folks are pros, with vast experience, and they can put together a show by theme, or to tell a story, or to set a mood, or to challenge you with some new things. Most of them now press the button on whatever they're told and read the title out.
But, every once in a while they sneak in a late night show now, maybe when mgmt isn't looking.
I wonder if this would be a good format for streaming, like the old days but global, with a live DJ and fans interacting live.
It is the most common format for clubs in virtual worlds, and I've found a lot of new music that way. One of my favorites is the saturday afternoon show in Utopia Skye, which is simulcast on Discord, allowing people who aren't in the virtual club to listen and to interact with the DJs.
> I wonder if this would be a good format for streaming, like the old days but global, with a live DJ and fans interacting live.
This is exactly why I've been working on a live streaming site for DJs and music lovers [1] where DJs can play whatever we like LIVE while also interacting with our listeners via a well-working chat (not those pesky shoutboxes most of radio stations seem to use). This differs from Twitch and other platforms being only focused on music and having lots of features for the DJs to engage and grow their fanbase.
I'm obviously biased but live streaming DJ sets and radio shows to a live international audience is very exciting and getting to listen proper oldskool DJs play awesome sets live feels always special. Internet FTW! :)
I've found Apple Music does this pretty well with some of it's scheduled programming like Beats 1, or the less frequently but quality stuff like Echo Chamber.
I miss disk jockeys. The ones who were knowledgeable about music, played B sides, and had some personality were gems. I found a station (KSLG) in northern California that still does this.
I like Spotify and there's a place for it. But I wouldn't call it fun. Listening to a good DJ was fun and sometimes informative.
That doesn't sound as bad as Pandora for me - I used to like it until Pandora kept playing Björk songs over and over and over, no matter how much I downvoted them!
Every light bulb has to be accessible enough to be changed. Most in-home bulbs are accessible by hand. The remainder are accessible by stepladder or by an extendable pole tool that is easily affordable by everyone who has ceilings that high.
The obvious placement for a reset button is somewhere that it cannot be accessed while the bulb is powered, such as near the screw-in Edison base, accessible only from the direction of the base. If the bulb is still screwed-in, you just can't align your paper clip with the pinhole, because the socket hardware is in the way. So the user has to remove the bulb, maybe also letting it cool off, before performing a pinhole reset.
And adding a reset button does not preclude a switch-controlled reset procedure, either. Press the reset button OR switch off for at least 15 seconds, on for two beats, off for one beat, on for three beats, off for one beat, on for five beats, off for one beat, then on again to receive the reset feedback flashes. Allow some percentage variance in the timing, so the slower the tempo, the easier it is to trigger the reset. "Off-one-two-off-one-two-three-off-one-two-three-four-five-off-reset." No one is going to do a sequence of primes by accident. And if you adjust timing on the fly, a machine-controlled bulb-resetter could reset a bulb in less than a second using a clock pulse generator, while a human could still do it in less than ten seconds by switching to a steady musical beat or by watching a timepiece.
Really, the only reason we want a button is because their timed power-cycle reset process is so ridiculous. Your reasons for not putting one in are valid, mainly under the assumption that a reset button would be mutually exclusive with a reset process. There's no reason why a bulb can't have both.
> My first thought is that many light bulbs are not easily accessible. They could be high up, or in a casing that requires a tool to open. So being able to reset them remotely is a practical benefit.
Light bulbs that get installed ARE accessible -- accessible enough to be installed and changed, at the very least, and that's all that's needed.
Remove the bulb, put it in a lamp, turn the lamp on, and push the button that should have been installed for a firmware update.
The "power on, wait, power off, wait," repeated 12 times or whatever should be a LAST RESORT only, imo.
> For some reason, GE decided not to install a physical reset button – you know, one of those tiny holes that you have to stick a pin or paperclip into.
Hmmm... Nope, I can't see a problem with getting people to stick a paperclip into holes around mains electricity! Sounds perfectly safe.
Seriously though, this is bonkers. Power cycling patterns are by far the best method for initiating a reset - and no, sending a reset command via apps is not feasible (what if you've lost the account password and you've accidentally paired it to your neighbours wifi?)
But all bulbs have a "first-use" setup procedure. So a simple power cycling routine (e.g. on-off 5 times with no more than 5 seconds in either state) - indicate with a flashing light when it's in the first-use state. Save the previous settings so that if the kids have done it (because they like the flashing lights) a simple power cycle will restore the previous settings.
that is exactly why the GE reset process is how it is, so you cant accidentally reset all the bulbs in your house, by flicking a switch 3 times. Ive even had bulbs reset being unscrewed while the power is on, because they flickered.
I have a lot of different brands of smart bulb, and I appreciate the GE procedure. The people complaining about it dont see why its the less bad alternative that 3-5 constantly timed power cycles.
Yep! And we have cheap wifi lightbulbs that have a reset mechanism similar to the one I described. He was less than 3 before he worked out that he could make the lights flash by switching on and off repeatedly.
Unfortunately, ours made the mistake of just forgetting everything when placed in reset mode, not being recoverable. Still, thankfully the phase was short-lived.
> and no, sending a reset command via apps is not feasible (what if you've lost the account password and you've accidentally paired it to your neighbours wifi?)
Hubs save all the pain with smart lighting system. No need for an account, system works locally. If you wanna control them remotely, you can (but you don't have to). Connected to the wrong wifi? Reset a hub instead of individual bulbs. You pair bulbs with hubs and have just one device spamming traffic to your router.
Ikea and Philips Hue seem to be the only systems that got this solution down properly.
I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners, I can't guarantee that the coverage will be good enough before committing to a whole system. Then there's interoperability - I don't really want to be locked in to Phillips bulbs (though I'm sure some are a little more interoperable than others)
So I'm left thinking: I already have a wireless signal hitting most of the house, why complicate things? I'm not sure ability to reset is worth it...
Note that the Philips system is a mesh network, so you communicate with the bulbs via WiFi/LAN to hit the hub, but the hub communicates via the mesh network, which lets it reliably reach distant bulbs out of WiFi range so long as there's a bulb chain it can bounce the signal along.
> I have a few problems with hubs; you need to store the physical thing somewhere, and as a house with difficulties in getting a wifi connection to corners
The hub only speaks WiFi to the app.
All the smart units (hub included) use Zigbee mesh-networking for cross device-communication, which is self-extending and only gets more reliable the more units you add.
At no point in time does IKEA or Hue bulbs depend on WiFi to function.
Ah, so you're thinking a switch that you depress, and stays depressed until you screw it back in? I guess that could work. I still don't have enough faith in humanity that someone might ignore the instructions and start poking around the electrical socket with a metal paperclip though...
Yep, this is people we're talking about! They'd be balancing 2 chairs on each other whilst randomly stabbing a paper clip in the direction of the bulb's screw, with the power on to be sure it worked! Product designers have to design for the stupidest of us.
I don't think it would need to be that complicated. Just a hole to put a paperclip into that completes a circuit and, I don't know, discharges a capacitor or uses one to clear something.
Also, light bulbs are only powered on when they are installed, oftentimes in inaccessible locations which can get pretty hot! A reset power cycle is hopefully an annoyance you only deal with once or twice.
Instead of a simple 8/2 second cycle they should tell the user "play the song 'Tubthumping' and turn the light off when you get knocked down, and turn the light on when you get up again!"
> Hmmm... Nope, I can't see a problem with getting people to stick a paperclip into holes around mains electricity! Sounds perfectly safe.
What say it needs to be in the socket? A battery or a capacitor is all you need to make sure it can still a bit outside its sockets (you don't need much to clear the memory either).
It could be a physical button too, no need for a pin.
A rechargeable battery can easily live just as long as the LEDs inside it.
I would still use a capacitor personally, but I said batteries because they could certainly work and Ikea does have a battery-powered light bulb with a button on it [1].
No need of faith, there are so many products that proved that you can trust rechargeable batteries. I'm considering buying a Volt right now and seems like that even the 2012 models are still keeping their ranges. I wish I could say that about many of my LEDS lightbulbs that are rated for tens of thousands of hours.
I had a chat with Japanese lifestyle management consultant for the rich recently. In the 90's Bill Gates had networked house and automatically adjusting lights and it was the peak of luxury. Today networking and automating the house is so affordable that it's not signalling luxury lifestyle.
Apparently doing simple mundane tasks gracefully and carefully without feeling irritated is quickly becoming a way to signal to other rich people. Self regulation, education and taste has always been part of the upper class lifestyle. It's something that money can't buy. Tastefully understated lifestyle and restricting gadget usage is how the rich signal to their peers.
> In the 90's Bill Gates had networked house and automatically adjusting lights and it was the peak of luxury.
Nonsense. X10 devices cost a bit more than regular outlets/switches/fixtures, but not much more. I know many people that added dimmers/timers/remote-control to their lights for a few hundred dollars in the late-80s/90s.
Home automation has been a solved problem with cheap and easy solutions for decades.
Except X10 devices are unsecure and can have issues with interference from neighboring homes. That's part of the reason why Insteon developed a new protocol, it mostly solves those two issues.
I'm only using X10 as an example with which I have personal experience. While it did have problems, it was a decent protocol considering it was developed in the 70s. I'm sure much better alternatives exist now (or could easily be developed).
The point is that lighting automation (and similar home automation features) is not a difficult problem, that doesn't need anything as powerful as a microcontroller or a dependency on the internet. A simple local-only control protocol is much more appropriate.
It was way more than just the lights. He had originally something like 50 NT-servers managing his mansion. You could wear a pin that indicated your location. Light, sound system, climate would adjust to your preferences as you moved.
Some of that automation might have needed servers to control, I was referring primarily to the "automatically adjusting lights", which hasn't been a luxury feature for a long time, even in Gates' house.
> 50 NT-servers
That was mostly Gates "eating his own dog food"[1]. Using anything other than NT could have been bad optics.
You should read Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead"[1] from 1995 before dismissing things so readily out of hand. It's been a few years since I read it but he describes the setup in detail. It was incredibly complex even by today's standards - and this was 30 years ago!
Solved for me, the expert, but not solved for thee, the lay person.
Even if this was technically within financial reach, my personal experience was that the knowledge of how to do it was intentionally obfuscated because installers wanted to make money.
Solved for thee, the lay person. You find your local home automation company and ask them to set up a system for you. Extra benefit: the company performs a one-time service for you and you end up with products you can optionally get them (or someone else) to maintain. Contrast with IoT, where you subscribe to a service that's most likely ephemeral, will brick your devices when the service ends, and exposes you to security risks.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, read "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System" by Fussell. It's a little bit out of date but it's still interesting.
It did make me realize that class is everywhere, and I'm constantly signaling it despite thinking I'm above caring about it.
At the current level of economic and technological development we could all be working fifteen hours a week and still have a great life [0]. Instead we keep ourselves busy designing "smart light bulb reset process", producing instructional videos about that process, watching instructional videos, and being frustrated when it eventually doesn't work.
I think he means if humans were rational and enlightened.
Note: the world started producing a surplus of food a while ago, and still we let many starve, and even today many people live with shortages and food insecurity.
Honestly, if you take a step back and look, a large portion of our economy are just bullshit jobs, or outright cronyism.
I mean, I worked in private sector fin tech (nothing fancy, more-pedestrian stuff) and I'm extremely confident we contributed close to nothing to society, while making good money. Some other work experience was with consulting government and that was just complete bullshit. Then there's books written on the "Rise of the Healthcare Administrator," which correctly point out their numbers have grown by 1-2 orders of magnitude while healthcare costs are up, quality is questionable and by the way, shouldn't technology have the opposite result? And finally, I'm not surprised to see GE as the culprit here. I know they have some brilliant groups, but that company is also infected with crazy politics and insanity from within.
"I'm not surprised to see GE as the culprit here. I know they have some brilliant groups, but that company is also infected with crazy politics and insanity from within"
I don't think GE consumer products are related to GE, the American company, for several years now. They sold the appliance business to Haier, I believe. Not sure if that would include things like smart bulbs.
Those rational and enlightened humans would have to be willing to move out of popular cities.
You work in technology. You are, in all likelihood, capable of moving to the country, cooking at home, and telecommuting for 15 hours a week. Have you? Why not?
just think about it. Factories produce with near zero human muscle costs endless supplies of goods that take care of all our vital needs. With a tiny little effort we could almost entirely automate food production. The way it is currently set up is because of the invention of money and ownership we are in a false sense of lacking something. We lack nothing anymore. In reality there is no lack, hasn't been since the invention of factories and farm machines.
Alan Watts predicted our overabundance of goods in the sixties and the problems we will face (and are facing).
Properly allocating all resources that humans produce on the scales larger than tribes is only really doable by markets. Ensuring universal access to a subset of those resources is only doable through government programs. Funding government programs is only really doable through taxation. So we're back where we started. You must tax the market to pay for the capacity to universally allocate some of the resources.
You can't tax a machine, you can only tax people, because people operate machines, they can't generate fungible resources (money) themselves. There will always be a market between resources and individuals.
"just think about it. Factories produce with near zero human muscle costs endless supplies of goods that take care of all our vital needs. With a tiny little effort we could almost entirely automate food production."
You're implying that costs are mostly physical effort and automation is a "tiny effort". That's a really weird thing to say on a forum called Hacker News, and why on earth do you think food production isn't "almost entirely automated"? Any prediction of a sudden change in the rate of a trend needs to explain why the change didn't happen more gradually and sooner, as soon as it was possible.
You can definitely afford it, you just have to not live like a typical modern American.
You can arrange your life around riding the bike and taking public transport, get a roommate, cook your own meals, etc. etc. and live on $20k/yr or less. Not in an expensive metropolis (easily), but there are plenty of other places where you can live.
Look at how big houses were in the early 1900s. And how often people ate meat.
Maybe if you are single, young American without any health issues or dependents, sure, why not. Is it attainable by everyone? I don't think so. It's a great ideal to have, and maybe someday a reality, but as things currently are, unrealistic.
You mean without kids, not owning place you live in, likely sharing flat, without abroad winter/summer holidays, living in places with good public transport without a car, where employer can actually accept 2 days a week employments?
no, you cannot. Not everyone can. At least, not in Germany. People pay 60% of their net income to rent while working 40 hours a week. How do you expect the rent to be paid with just 15 hours of work per week in Germany?
The big con is working 40 hours a week to afford to rent/own/buy a place to live so you can continue working said 40 hours a week.
Cut it to 15, move to cheaper residence and cut out gadgets, buying useless shit and owning lots of things.
This frees up huge chunks of time and creativity and freedom. The freedom you thought you were working towards toiling 40 hours of your life per week.
You mean the economy which produces all of the useless things that the parent just said we should stop consuming mindlessly? Slowing economic development is a benefit.
I remember this being brought up on reddit. Yes it's ridiculously lengthy, but having a procedure instead of a reset button is actually a smart idea. So they've taken a kernel of a good idea and went overboard on trying to protect users from accidentally resetting.
Having a procedure allows you to reset bulbs in hard-to-reach places or a whole set of lights in one room can be reset using the one lightswitch.
Well I would assume if you find yourself in a situation you need to reset a lightbulb in a light fitting, it's likely you would need to reset them all seeing as they're all being used for the same purpose/connecting to the same network.
You reset them because they stopped working correctly, otherwise you would reconfigure with an app or something. If you say one needs to reset them all, you mean that they have all broken.
I cant help but feel that there is a mismatch here between how electrical circuits and electronic circuits are wired. With electronics you have separate signalling and power but with electrical they are combined i.e. the “on” signal turning on the light switch is combined with power deliver of the electicity that powers the light bulb. Arguably for this to ever work properly your lights must always be “on” and their luminesnce mediated by a separate signaling channel. Then reseting is merely a matter of turning it “off” then “on”. Though perhaps a technical help desk would still be required...
There are a lot of things you don't do it you have a toddler. Putting a smart bulb on a light switch the toddler can actually reach can be one of them.
Imagine if your phone needed a factory reset after getting malware and the procedure meant the all the phones in the family got a factory reset, does that seem convenient?
This is a terrible analogy and I hope you see that. They are completely different use cases. Do you have your family phones situated in your ceiling all linked together in a fitting? This procedure is inconvenient, but the idea of using a procedure is very smart.
If you have kids they play with turning the light switch on and off. So I can see the need not to reset by accident.
A simpler solution is to have ordinary plain light bulbs. Probably friendlier to the environment due to less electronics. It’s hard to hack ordinary light bulbs so they are secure.
Reset button makes sense though. Reset button are costlier for bill of materials so manufacturers save on that.
Reset button is actually a safety issue, as the bulb would have to be plugged into the mains to register the reset. A metal paperclip inserted into the body of the light bulb would be very problematic from an electrical isolation point of view.
The big failure arguably is not testing the firmware sufficiently (or building in recovery algorithms) to necessitate a reset procedure in the first place.
Let me think - the reset button can only work when the light is powered up (and maybe too hot to touch) - you can't mount it on the metal base because that's live when it's on, and so the light fitting is designed so you can't touch the base. you could mount it in the glass but it would cast a shadow ...
> Let me think - the reset button can only work when the light is powered up (and maybe too hot to touch)
A capacitor that is kept charged during normal operation, and that powers the reset circuit which you close with your metal pin once you unscrew the bulb. The circuit flips some bits in persistent memory of the bulb.
No. "Reset" is done by a circuit, and the only way to power it is by connecting that capacitor to it by pushing something into the reset pinhole. If you don't do that, capacitor eventually discharges but since the circuit never gets powered, no reset happens. So after a while you need to connect the bulb to mains power in order to be able to perform reset.
It’s a heat sink that gets hot to to the touch, though not that quickly as your talking ~10w of waste heat. Sill several ways to do a reset switch just after power is off.
Firmware is likely to be stored in flash memory, which is far more resilient to cosmic rays than SRAM or DRAM. You might find a bitflip is so unlikely it's far below the other in-service failure rates and you'd rather just handle the returns. Of course, a reset is still useful for other reasons. All assuming you don't use the bulbs in your airplane/space shuttle!
Sure, but the whole point of factory reset is when the paired phone app no longer talks to the bulb. ( You might have lost the phone or the account details). It just allows you to start with the assumption you are physically in control of the bulb and hence are authorised to reset it.
So if you have this installed in a ceiling fixture, you have to get a ladder, take off the shade, hope the bulb happens to be oriented the right way in the light fixture for you to access the switch.
Or, you could play that video and follow along and flip a switch a few times.
Sometimes the physical reset button would be the worst way to reset. I have lifx gen 1 bulbs (post Kickstarter) throughout my house and they are in high places/not easy to access without renting a large ladder/scaffold. Even the worst on/off procedure to reset would be easier than climbing to get to a physical switch.
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines. I mean, I'm as geeky as it gets, but I'm still "amused" by the fact that we have lightbulbs with a firmware and a reset procedure, books that need to be charged and fridges that tweet.
The first time I had to upgrade the firmware on my smart lightbulbs, it was so weird. But you get used to it! And I think they were one of the best purchases I did to be honest.
Some features I love;
# When I come to my home during the evening, lights are automatically turned on.
# When I leave my place, they automatically turn off.
# You can set up alarms, like 30 minutes before my alarm goes off in the morning, lights are starting turn on slowly. By the time the alarm goes off, the room is completely lit.
If you don't want it that's totally fine. That doesn't mean that some people (including myself) find it incredibly convenient to be able to control lights on a schedule, or by voice, even if you didn't set it in advance (as would be required for a traditional mechanical switch).
Well, maybe I have done that somewhere in the past ten years. If that's the case then I probably got out of bed, turned it off and went back to bed again. And immediately forgot that it happened, because it is only a very minor inconvenience. Really a lot less hassle than dealing with this IoT tech.
Sure, but wall timers (for lamps) have a garbage user experience, and for the price of one wired-in fixture timer (where a wall switch would go) + new bulbs you might as well have bought a smart hub.
The problem is badly designed interfaces, not the underlying technology itself.
as far as I can make out, most "smart" devices have garbage UX and reliability, not to mention they'll sell you out to any intelligence agency you'd care to mention.
and what's more, the stuff that worked 50 years ago will probably still work in another 50 months whereas I'd be surprised if the modern junk would last 15 months.
My shitty smart plugs sometimes don’t turn on. Can you imagine how frustrating not have your lights respond to a flick of a switch or request to turn on!?
It’s infuriating!
Also this reminds me I need to put all my lights on a DMZ.
I had one of those remote control light things back in 2007 - it was great until somebody out on the street would bleep their car alarm and all my lights would turn off. It was this experience that resolved me to not waste my time with smart technologies unless they we’re at least as convenient as their dumb counterparts.
This is why I don't buy the "IoT smart home" future. There's no such thing as a "smart" device that doesn't typically break within 4-5 years. Dozens of such devices in a house means you'd be dealing with a broken device every few months, which is my nightmare.
I want the LEAST amount of complexity possible to control all my critical living functions, from fridges to windows to lights to cars.
I am all for dumb appliances over the current crop of "smart" appliances, but one feature I would LOVE would be some kind of sensor log of my refrigerator! This would help to know if the power went off while I was gone - did the temperature rise too much? That is all I need...
The same would apply to other appliances and HVAC, just simple data to know everything is working correctly.
The fridge is trickier, but for your freezer fill a small plastic cup with water and let it freeze. Then place a penny on top of it. If it gets warm enough for the water to melt the penny will drop.
You could do this today without any sort of "smart" appliance for about $1.00, $50 if you are being lazy. Just get a super simple micro-controller and radio on a board and throw it into your fridge. Have it record the temperature at a regular interval into a ring buffer and poll it periodically from a chron script. Get your power from the light switch in the fridge door. Alternatively, a Li-po or Li-ion battery can last an extremely lond time powering a little micro in a refrigerator. If you put a $0.02 photo diode on it, you could also track how often the door is open.
If you went the full on $50 route and bought a pre-integrated board with wifi and a full linux stack, you could even have a push notification to twitter or email or whatever when the temperature goes out of spec.
I bought a digital thermometer with min/max from Walmart for $5, but the problem was the temperature would rise quite a bit (above 40F) if the door was left open even for ~10-30 seconds, so it was hard to use the "max" temperature reading.
It would have been more handy if the thermometer's min and max responded more slowly to reject these short fluctuations.
If all you want is to check for power outages, you could use a Raspberry Pi Zero that has a program that notifies you when it starts, and constantly logs a heartbeat to a file. If you run the program at startup, you'll be notified when the power comes back on.
I have a smart things hub which is pretty good for this purpose - but the main problem is to make sure the baby's milk stays good so I would like confirmation at the end of a power outage that the temperature is still acceptable.
Luckily the power is reliable here, but as they say, winter is coming!
I used these [1] with remote thermocouples to track temp mostly in curing epoxy for my biz, but also for freezers. They work great, and should for your freezer application too. Get the one with the display and you can view the current/hi/lo temps anytime, and grab the data for extended review. I've found that I can see the freezer's on-off cycles very well, pretty much the expected sawtooth wave...
I can't believe I haven't thought of that ha! I'll have to check it out - hopefully I can get a zigbee signal through the fridge itself (I am not sure if it is a Faraday cage or not)
Why do you need a signal? You don't care about the temperature until you open your fridge to either consume to toss food, do you? Buy a digital thermometer for ten bucks, one that keeps a record of max/min, toss it in there, look at the max reading when you return from out of town.
If your power goes out you'll need aux power for whatever is reading the signal, otherwise it also won't work. You are making a huge project with all kinds of failure modes when this problem has been solved for ages. Kind of like the house with no mechanical light switches that you are responding to!
I mentioned it up earlier but I did try out a simple battery digital min/max thermometer, but every time you opened the door the air temperature would rise above 40F (highest recommended temp to store dairy), which made it hard to use for the intended purpose!
If the thermometer had more thermal mass attached to it (or simply had a low pass filter on the readout), it would have worked great.
I also had an analog thermometer at one point, but obviously the problem here is if the power goes out, then comes back on and returns to the proper temperature.
My smart home is pretty simple: our existing ceiling lights and air conditioners are IR controlled so I bought some cheap Chinese IR blasters and installed Homebridge on my NAS. This means when I'm lying in the sofa trying to get my daughter to sleep I can easily turn the lights down/redirect the breeze, but at the same time nothing at all is actually dependent on the smarts, it's pure convenience.
I decided to give away my "smart" door lock and test setup of "smart" light bulbs. I have better things to do than pretending to be tech helpdesk for mye house/family for things that aren't really giving me much benefit. The door lock had some nice features, but I had no secondary way of entering the house without breaking something so I decided it was too high risc. The Philips HUE lightbulbs are not capable of remembering their last state so they default to full throttle, making them painful to live with.
> The Philips HUE lightbulbs are not capable of remembering their last state so they default to full throttle
That is indeed the default behavior, but they can recall the previous state or another setting altogether after losing power. See “Power-on behavior” under Settings in the app.
>The door lock had some nice features, but I had no secondary way of entering the house without breaking something so I decided it was too high risc.
Which smart door lock doesn't allow a key to unlock? Even if it malfunctions horribly, it's not as if the lock is powerful enough to prevent someone from twisting using the key. Most use AA batteries.
The process is the same for my Cree Connected bulbs and my GE Link bulbs, except a bit shorter (2 seconds on, 2 seconds off, repeat 4-5x). I was able to reset a dozen bulbs in just a few minutes, to pair them with a new hub, by just flicking the light switches (that control banks of bulbs each) without removing the bulbs. Having to remove each bulb and individually reset it with a paperclip would be less convenient.
> For some reason, GE decided not to install a physical reset button – you know, one of those tiny holes that you have to stick a pin or paperclip into. Instead, it programmed the devices to factory reset after being turning on and off in a specific pattern.
Physical reset switch would be great, unless you've got 20 lights all installed in a chandelier 30 feet up.
Even though the Hue app isn't great, the Phillips Hue lights are something I recommend to non-tech people I know as an intro to the smart home. I have them all over my house, and they pretty much never fail to do what you expect (just like dumb appliances). Wi-fi switches are great and haven't had to replace a battery yet after maybe 4 years.
I find waking up with the light slowly brightening so much better than an alarm, but just as effective.
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's a legitimate question.
The use-case is not clear to me either. Is it to create atmosphere with the various colors? Have them turn on automatically to give the impression the home isn't empty when I'm on vacation (à-la "Home Alone")?
You can use the various colors for atmosphere, but it's useful when it's late at night and you either need to focus on something (so you shift to white/blue), or you want to slow down and get ready for bed (shift to red- F.lux helps but why not the whole room?).
Most wall timers can only turn lamps on and off on schedule, but they make a mess of the light's functionality if the light is not in the state you want it outside of that schedule, and they can't control ceiling fixtures. Smart lights make both tasks easy.
Old apartments don't have dimmer switches, so if you want less light you're out of luck. Smart lights are dimmable on any circuit (though less effective if dimmers already exist on said circuit).
They're worth less if your home already has custom lighting options installed, uses bulbs that don't have a smart option available, or are badly designed like this GE product (though others aren't that much better). Otherwise, the cost per light upgraded with a good smart light bulb beats the cost of that same light + a timer + bulbs that emit other colors and the non-financial costs of how inconvenient those things are.
I'm not saying it isn't a luxury product, because it very much is, but if you have any of those goals/constraints there's nothing else on the market that can do that.
Because smart bulbs are the cheapest and best option for making the following possible:
* Wake timers. I can wake up with light shining in my face even with the curtains drawn, which makes it easier for my body to sense that it's time to wake up and harder for it to fall back to sleep. Bonus points if it's green or blue on a grey day, which the more expensive bulbs allow you to choose.
* Security and timing. Lights can be programmed to turn on and off at semi-random times to simulate the appearance of someone being home, and normal wall timers only control lamps, not ceiling fixtures. Those timers are also a terrible programming experience compared to a good smartphone app, and they flat out disable the light when off (smart lights on a timer can be overridden by cycling the fixture's power, which cheap wall timers don't detect).
* On-the-fly color shifting. Certain colors of light help me focus when I'm up late at night wrangling code; others help sleep. A dim red light at night means you can easily find your way to the bathroom around possible obstacles without fully waking yourself up.
* Dimmers. In apartments and other living arrangements where you can't do electrical work, and that don't already have dimmers, this is the only way to have lights with variable brightness.
The only thing that smart lights don't do is come in 100W-equivalent models- at least, not Hue bulbs, which make the colors and maximum light output dimmer than might be desired.
That said, the GE thing is clearly a "feature" that some engineer was either forced to implement (or worse, thought it was a good idea) because they didn't want to shell out the 5 cents per unit for the reset button. Which is a valid point, but the fact you have to do that in the first place betrays larger and more fundamental problems with their product.
* No internet (or other network) access. It worked as long as the mains power was on.
* Putting the control in the outlet or fixture allowed any type of light or device to be controlled. (My father used this to remotely control a CCTV camera)
* Plugging a X10-enabled dimmer lamp into a standard outlet (like any other lamp) allowed remote dimming without the need for any modifications to the existing electric outlets/etc.
(full-range color LED lights didn't exist yet, but controlling color could have easily used a similar protocol).
This type of feature doesn't need and shouldn't be implemented with a "smart" controller. If the design includes a "reset" procedure, it's overengineered and overcomplicated for basic automation of simple devices like lights. If the design requires internet access, it's a broken design that unnecessarily introduces an external dependency and risk of remote attack.
Yes I wonder why they didn't use an industry-standard wireless protocol. Possibly one named after a Norse king and built into basically every phone made in the last decade or so.
> * Dimmers. In apartments and other living arrangements where you can't do electrical work, and that don't already have dimmers, this is the only way to have lights with variable brightness.
For me that's the only "smart" feature I wanted and I discovered that there are some light bulbs with an integrated dimmer like Philips SceneSwitch or Osram Duo Click Dim.
We have one in our home. We switched bedroom door to open the other way than it used to be. Now when the door is open, the light switch is behind the door. It was easier to buy one smart light bulb + Bluetooth light switch, rather than rewiring the old switch to a new location, patch the hole from the old location etc. :)
As with everything IoT related, to collect data on the user, to create brand lock-in, and/or to be able to charge more for a "smart" version of a product.
Ikea bulbs use a 6 on-off cycle to reset, which is pretty simple (no timing), although toddler can do it. Hue bulbs require either a bridge (if it's linked to them, is one click in the interface, if not, you need to get the secret code which is printed on the actual bulb and enter it), or using a remote (press and hold I and O buttons for about 10 seconds, while holding remote next to bulb). The remote also resets other types of bulb, but has a pretty short range, so unless you have a multi-bulb fitting with several bulbs within about 10cm of the remote, it doesn't cause problems. Still a pain to do compared to the Ikea ones!
Ikea smart outlets have a pin hole reset though, and absolutely no buttons other than that, which I've found makes them pretty toddler proof (the fish tank lighting kept getting set to random by our toddler when using a traditional timer outlet...)
On-off a bunch of times puts the bulb into a receptive state for 30 seconds, where it will stop everything else (other than the light being on) and listen for admin commands from a controller, one of which is "reset".
Kids messing with the lights? If no admin command gets sent, it returns to normal operation after 30 seconds.
It's not about about technical problem that's idiotic, any HN reader could solve this way better. Imagine the bureaucracy and processes at GE that let this product to production. How many eyes looked at it and thought it's a good idea? It even went through a firmware refresh :) This will be an iconic product of the IoT era, not it a good way of course.
I've seen this kind of thing everywhere, from startups to bigcorp. I've seen entire teams of otherwise smart people come up with the most idiotic systems, and swear up and down that there's nothing wrong. It's not a bureaucratic problem; it's a people problem. And it's not that they're stupid... it's something else.
Well, as someone else said, a reset procedure is probably for a situation where it's not processing commands from a controller for whatever reason. If it is, you still need a reset procedure for when it isn't.
I've come to the conclusion that the point of the whole 'smart home' and 5G in every neighborhood is really just to improve surveillance of a greater percentage of the population for a bigger portion of the day by whomever. I don't see any other real practical advantage for consumers to networking any appliances. It's a lot more complexity for little to no gain.
Reminds me of the key programming method for my 2003 car: Sit in the driver seat of your G35. Close all of the car doors. Insert the key into the ignition then remove it. Repeat this process six times within 10 seconds. Watch for the emergency lights to flash on the car to indicate that programming mode is active.
In the 2007 Honda Accord you had to push the Emergency Brake button a number of times while doing something. I don't recall the exact procedure but I found it highly amusing at the time.
Something I had never thought of before recently - what if you are in your car with pushbutton stop-start, like most newer cars have, and there's an emergency where you need to turn the engine off, but the computer isn't responding, either because you're not in park, there's an electrical malfunction, or whatever?
I read that typically pressing the button several times or holding it down should shut the engine off. Which I'm sure seems to an engineer like a clever solution because isn't that what a person who's panicking would naturally do?
Except that people don't necessarily do that; they hit the button once or twice and then decide it isn't working. Or they don't think of it at all because they're more focused on their car being on fire. As documented on a video I saw.
The key and keyless systems still fundamentally work the same way.
In purely mechanical ignitions systems in cars prior to the 90s, the ignition switch is just a momentary switch that requires the key to actuate it. Once on, the key however can't be removed without triggering the momentary switch again that tells the car to shut off. That why when you see someone hot wiring a car in a movie they aren't tying wires together, they just touch them momentarily.
Since the 90s, most cars rely on transponder systems embedded in the keys. There are various systems from microprocessors with exposed contacts to NFC wireless chips but they work mostly the same. There's still a momentary switch whether it be key based or not but the car won't start unless the transponder successfully authenticates.
Since the transponder system is required to start the car, having the key on the ignition switch became redundant and was replaced with just a push button.
2) You don't want this to be so easy to reset that children playing with it will do it by accident.
I feel that a good compromise between the two would be a rule of "flick the switch on and off three times in two minutes, with the on state being longer than 3 sec".
This makes it easy to reset, just flick it on and off three times slowly, but hard to reset accidentally, since children don't tend to flick light bulbs on and off that slowly. For added safety, you can make the "on" time 5 seconds instead of 3.
I don't think "flick it on and off slowly three times, with each flick lasting at least five seconds" is hard to follow.
I'd want to like GE products but the false advertising on their blacklight LED bulb and their subsequent reaction to my notifying them of such pretty much turns me off of their products entirely.
Long story short, 7W UV LED advertised blacklight bulb. Only one LED is UV and the other four are white LEDs, behind a fake woods glass filter. Yanked out the UV LED, dropped it into my Fermata light (pad/form factor compatible) and turned it into the mineral specimen lamp I was hoping to get from the original bulb.
I want a "Read Only" smart house. One that tells me when the refrigerator temperature is getting too high or if some appliance has a high resistance short that's making it use extra electricity. When it comes to everything else, I want switches and wires. I wish I could buy a TV without the stupid "Smart" features that turns on in seconds, but it seems like they all have something installed that makes me have to "Boot" my TV.
Smart bulbs are near useless tech behind dumb switches anyway. You have a light connected to an app but 50/50 chance that the last person left the switch in the right position for the bulb to get power at all.
It might be possible to install return springs in the switches I’m not sure?
It may have been less annoying if the sequence was decreasing the amount of focus time between switching (4 seconds then 3, etc.) with a fast blinking sequence to confirm the user is still on tracks.
I bought some light bulbs the other day that had, as a selling point specifically printed on the box, the statement that they are NOT connected to the Internet.
ugh, why did they have to change the speed of the circle for the two second period? it would have been better to just show the two second part as 1/4th of the 8 second period.
if the device is raddio (bluetooth) controlled, wouldnt it be more sane to reset through the bluetooth device? perhaps a unique serial number on the bulb (verifies access to the bulb), and/or a bulb generated string of random bits (on/off), so the user enters for say 10 cycles if the bulb is on or off (prevents replay attacks)? ok, you should close the window blinds.
or even simpler: just unscrew and rescrew the lightbulb to reset!
How does the light bulb know it's unscrewed? How is that different from turning the switch off?
it could easily measure this by either:
- a limit switch, or
- a split center electrode: if there is a conducting path between left and right halves between center electrode, then the bulb is screwed in, or
- measuring the capacitance between outer and center electrode: in open air there is the known capacitance, when screwed in both the electrodes of the housing, and the long parallel conductors going to the switches will alter the capacitance
- myriad other ways: electrically there is a huge difference between an unscrewed bulb, and a screwd-in bulb in an open circuit
a capacitor to power the microcontroller for a few milliseconds?
actually, if the goal is to detect a reset operation by unscrewing: while unscrewing and shortly after the circuit is open, the previously contacting electrodes are still close by, such that it can be powered capacitively while it realizes it is being reset... this is probably noticable by measuring the change in complex impedance
The first thing I thought of was why anyone would possibly be interested in buying these things.
Afterwards, I rationalized that there are those who want the latest hi-tech gadgets and see these as being state-of-the-art without really understanding their impacts.
Finally, after reading the inane steps needed to reset your light bulb, I could only think that I would hope that purchasers keep the owner's manual (for a light bulb?) is a well-known place because after a couple of months, nobody is going to remember the steps.
>If Facebook had made the light bulb, you’d have to unfriend the lightbulb for it to reset.
The funny thing is, I can see IoT enabled devices using social media accounts as an interface. You would be required to follow your appliances on Facebook or Twitter or whatever and your refrigerator would PM you when you were low on juice or something.
> You would be required to follow your appliances on Facebook or Twitter or whatever and your refrigerator would PM you when you were low on juice or something.
I remember a time when we were promised smart fridges that would be able to give the user a live inventory and even automatically reorder food when items were running low. Instead we got "smart" light bulbs that give you an epileptic fit when they inevitably stop working and need to be factory reset.
A voice command probably (1) requires it to be connected to its hub, (2) which needs internet and be able to reach the voice processing servers of the vendor, (3) which needs to be still in business and running said servers.
The reason for needing to reset are likely to be the first and second requirement, so that wouldn't work. The third requirement just means you need to buy a new light bulb (at least that is the way the market seems to work for this gear).
Anyway, about a month after the project got handed over, my brother gets a call: the computer had somehow worked itself into the state of "beyond fucked", the new computer brought by the vendor was refusing to talk to the controllers, parts were backordered, long story short, the house had been unlivable for a week with no end in sight, and could my brother come over and save it somehow. I think he was able to turn on a few of the most critical things on in manual mode, but obviously he couldn't wire up the hundreds of electrical devices in the house. Not sure what happened later.