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Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

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Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#61

Post by ocdtrekkie »

gregmac wrote: post #48
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly recommend that any home automation device you buy has a direct method that it can be interfaced with and programmed in a local way. If a device is only programmable by a web API, rule it out. You may also wish to consider looking for devices which are based on a switch, rather than a bulb. Controllable bulbs do not play nice with the state of physical light switches, and in the case of multi-bulb fix…

I never understood the desire to control lights without using a wall switch. I say this having had X10 and later Insteon installations in 3 different houses over the past 10 years. Even today, I have the ability to control nearly all the lights on the main floor of my house with an app on my phone. I actually use this feature maybe once or twice a year, being generous. Even if my phone is on me and already unlocked (…

I certainly use remote activation when I'm not home, for instance, I have cameras so I can check on my pets, and I turn on the lights so I can see better when it's dark. (They're infrared cams, but that's questionably useful sometimes.)

But yeah, 90% of the time, if I am turning on a light, I'm hitting the physical switch. So a bulb that is ignorant of my switch's position isn't a lot of use to me. Because if I want to turn that bulb on... my switch is probably already off. And the bulb can't work if the physical switch is off.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#62

Post by [deleted] »

gregmac wrote: post #55
chc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you can say that this is both "not a problem" and "why you shouldn't buy into closed, walled-garden products." Best I can tell, the thing Philips did here that people are objecting to is turning Philips Hue into a walled garden where before it was not. So if this is an example of why you shouldn't buy into closed, walled-garden products, then it sounds like this product's owners have a legitimate prob…

I unfortunately don't know the entire history here, but it really comes down to what was purchased. If Philips sold the Philips Hue hub as a generic controller for all Zigbee lights, then yeah, I'd agree: they essentially did a bait-and-switch after purchase, and this is totally wrong. Like class-action lawsuit wrong. If they sold it as a controller for Philips bulbs without mentioning Zigbee interoperability, then i…

[deleted]

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#63

Post by steven2012 »

someotheracct7 wrote: post #43

This is odd, but not catastrophic. If I understand right, Zigbee is open, so what's to stop the bulbs working with a third-party controller hub? Say, a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee interface? Wonder if this is still relevant? http://www.everyhue.com/vanilla/discussion/141/getting-hue-t... That thread suggests it's possible to have Hue bulbs join third-party ZigBee networks.

It's the other way around. People want to use their non-Hue lights with the Hue bridge, which is no longer possible. Now it means having to buy another bridge that supports both.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#64

Post by soperj »

mdip wrote: post #35

I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions. I can't see any upside to this and I can't imagine what the discussion looked like when implementing this decision. My (admittedly cynical) guess is that it was one part "We're fielding a lot of support questions on products that aren't ours and our malfunctioning" and two parts "Our customers will be more motivated to buy Philips Hue products…

And yet, lots of people don't avoid Apple.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#65

Post by [deleted] »

Laaw wrote: post #31
gregmac wrote: post #22

This is the Philips controller software (app) that is refusing to talk to or control 3rd party light bulbs. I don't really see this as being a problem. It's not the nicest thing, perhaps, but neither is 3rd party companies building bulbs (presumably by ripping off the design and protocol of Philip's bulbs), and then relying on Philips to build the software so they can actually be used. In other words, Philips is refu…

Would you be saying that if Google decided to block all non-google websites from working in Chrome?

[deleted]

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#66

Post by bjt »

bitwize wrote: post #28
jcromartie wrote: post #20

Are there grounds for a lawsuit when a manufacturer pushes out an update to a product that intentionally degrades its feature set like this? This is no longer the same product that these users bought, it's effectively damaged by the update.

No, technically the third-party manufacturers were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal offense with penalties up to five years in prison. From Philips' perspective, refusing to cooperate with those criminally infringing their IP is a feature, not a bug.

This is wrong on a couple levels.

1. The protocol is open. It's not Philips' IP.

2. Even if the protocol were closed, and Philips put some DRM on it to lock out 3rd parties from reverse engineering the protocol to make compatible bulbs, the third parties still wouldn't be in violation of the DMCA, even if they had to include small copy/pasted bits of the Philips code that are necessary for interoperability. This was the holding in the Lexmark case back in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v....

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#67

Post by tdkl »

mdip wrote: post #35

I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions. I can't see any upside to this and I can't imagine what the discussion looked like when implementing this decision. My (admittedly cynical) guess is that it was one part "We're fielding a lot of support questions on products that aren't ours and our malfunctioning" and two parts "Our customers will be more motivated to buy Philips Hue products…

> I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions.

Because they can. John Doe will think "oh, I just need to shell out some money to get it working again", or "oh, the system needed an upgrade anyway".

The mobile bonanza (well, that one company who gets majority of revenue from hardware) in last couple of years perverted the word "upgrade" from "a software upgrade, which adds new features and ads value to existing purchased product", to "needing to buy a new device to keep on going with existing performance". I'm happy to see this hasn't spread to the desktop PC. Yet.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#68

Post by ChuckMcM »

IshKebab wrote: post #52
mdip wrote: post #35

I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions. I can't see any upside to this and I can't imagine what the discussion looked like when implementing this decision. My (admittedly cynical) guess is that it was one part "We're fielding a lot of support questions on products that aren't ours and our malfunctioning" and two parts "Our customers will be more motivated to buy Philips Hue products…

Having been involved in a couple of these discussions, I'd say it is more like "Shouldn't we control this? Are other people doing stuff with our products that we don't control? That's bad isn't it? Let's stop them." I.e. it's more about paranoid control than actual reasons .

I have heard similar discussions, mostly around support. Which is to say when a third party bulb doesn't work, who gets the support call? When you compute the cost and margin of a consumer device you have to include the cost of support as a burden on overall profit margin. If support costs eliminate profit margin then you start losing money and that sucks. What is worse, if you raise your prices to cover the support cost, the 3rd party bulbs look that much better and that just increases your cost. Sort of a catch 22

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#69

Post by paulannesley »

jfoutz wrote: post #9
Someone1234 wrote: post #7

I always wondered about smart bulbs... How much, per year, do they cost to run idle? Since they appear to use wireless to operate, so there must be at least the draw for that.

the hue bulbs use zigbee, so way less than, say, wifi, but it looks like about .4W/bulb/day 2.8W for the starter kit (base has to be on as well) http://greenmonk.net/2014/02/20/internet-things-connected-ph...

Watts already express energy over time, so the /day is redundant. The article you linked to gives a good comparison:

> [three bulbs + bridge] is the equivalent of leaving a 60W bulb on for a little over an hour and seven minutes per day

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#70

Post by ChuckMcM »

someotheracct7 wrote: post #43

This is odd, but not catastrophic. If I understand right, Zigbee is open, so what's to stop the bulbs working with a third-party controller hub? Say, a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee interface? Wonder if this is still relevant? http://www.everyhue.com/vanilla/discussion/141/getting-hue-t... That thread suggests it's possible to have Hue bulbs join third-party ZigBee networks.

Yes, you can do this. And for the most part you can control your lights from your own software. I was looking at the protocol using a HackRF One to see how easy or hard it would be to build a replacement hub controller. I don't know if there are any patent issues however, that would be something that you couldn't really code around.
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