Live data from Hacker News

Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

home-assistant.io

131–140 of 303 posts

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#131
post #48

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 (…

> Or, even better, a timer/motion sensor has already turned on the light for me and I don't even have to think about it. This is what real home automation is all about.

And doesn't involve a wall switch.

Of course, a fully integrated system with switch/dimmer modules in the electrical system is nice, but not really an option in many situations (e.g. renters). Control purely by a phone is certainly not ideal, but is a simplest useable solution you can build on, with additional hardware, apps for special functions, ...

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#132
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> INSTEON documentation is actually somewhat decent. But fragmented. Any help, please? For example, let's say that I want to buy a USB interface (for a controller), a motion sensor, and a light switch (eg. a micro dimmer). I want to plug the USB interface into a modern Linux distribution and speak to it to read motion and the switch and control the light (and configure the switch to operate the light directly without…

I would hope that this website helps: http://www.linuxha.com/common/iplcd/

The worthwhile note there is everything regarding the "PLC" rather than the PLM is too old to work with modern devices. The 2414 is basically not supported by anything anymore. And that page is eight years old, so it's likely missing any content on most of the newer INSTEON devices and protocols.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#133
post #131
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

> Or, even better, a timer/motion sensor has already turned on the light for me and I don't even have to think about it. This is what real home automation is all about. And doesn't involve a wall switch. Of course, a fully integrated system with switch/dimmer modules in the electrical system is nice, but not really an option in many situations (e.g. renters). Control purely by a phone is certainly not ideal, but is a…

Why? It's pretty easy to swap out a light switch when you move in, and put it back when you move out, without causing any real 'damage' to the unit.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#135
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pi Zero might be able to do some additional interesting things through with that computing power, including transmitting information over those LEDs at imperceptible modulation frequencies and such. Perhaps it could even be a Ethernet-over-Power to Li-Fi bridge, with some additional circuitry. No Wi-Fi sucks though. And putting Wi-Fi into a Pi Zero requires a micro-USB to USB dongle and then another USB Wi-Fi don…

I've seen some cool mods where someone took a USB hub or a wifi dongle out of its case and soldered the pins directly to the USB pins on the Pi itself. That gets around a lot of the mess.

I'd gladly pay another $2-3 extra for someone to do that for me with some automated manufacturing process, and sell me "Pi Zero with Wi-Fi" boards. Soldering mini-USB can be a bear, let alone doing it 10+ times to get a room full of mini-robots or drones or something else to do interesting things. The true value in a cheap computer is really that I can buy a huge number of them at a reasonable price. But a huge number of mini-PCs is terrible if you have to mod each board. If I only needed one, I'd be okay paying $100 for it.

Even better if it's a "Pi Zero with USB Hub and Wi-Fi" for, say, $15, so that I can actually add something else useful besides Wi-Fi, such as a camera or sensor or something else. Sure, there are GPIO pins, but there are a lot of super-useful things out there that come in USB.

I use an Arduino Yun for a lot of basic tasks such as having a sensor report values over Wi-Fi, or putting a couple servos on Wi-Fi with as little work as possible, but the price is steep at $60+ and not much computing power.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#136
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, even better, a timer/motion sensor has already turned on the light for me and I don't even have to think about it. This is what real home automation is all about. And doesn't involve a wall switch. Of course, a fully integrated system with switch/dimmer modules in the electrical system is nice, but not really an option in many situations (e.g. renters). Control purely by a phone is certainly not ideal, but is a…

Why? It's pretty easy to swap out a light switch when you move in, and put it back when you move out, without causing any real 'damage' to the unit.

All electrical work in the unit has to be done by someone legally qualified to do so (I'm not) and it is not worth getting a bill for a "proper" electrician to fix it for. Also only work for one lamp per room (that already has a light switch) and doesn't do any fancy new color-control features. Everything else needs additional modules and wireless controls anyways, so why do it differently for this one case?

Exchanging batteries in additional lightswitches seems stupid, but doesn't happen THAT often. You can add them if you want them, others make do with the phone and maybe NFC tags or other tricks.

Sure, if I owned the place or would be staying here for many years it might be worth it, but not yet.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slippery slope of "intellectual property" is so steep that even building interface-compatible products is now considered ripping something off. We've come a long way from the age of IBM compatibles and the PC revolution.

On the other hand you could argue that while the pc revolution fueled on DOS licensing and IBM compatible BIOS was a a massive leap for the economy overall, it wasnt the best move for IBM in either the short nor the long term. Now they do the no-scales business of services and consulting...

$13.5 Billion in yearly revenue is apparently low scale these days.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#138
post #78
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> that one company who gets majority of revenue from hardware I hope you are not referring to Apple, because compared to other companies , iPhones and iPads are the one who can run current software on older devices with almost no issues. Samsung and other android manufacturers on the other hand have not supported older devices at all until recently (and even now not as good as Apple does). My first gen iPad still run…

So true. Google even turned off the DNS for the activation servers for their Android 2.1 devices (at least for the HTC Wildfire) so I could no longer log in with Google to get into the phone and do anything at all. Contrast this to my first generation iPhone which still works despite being several years older...

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#139
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…

Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…

There's two problems here:

1. The costs they're incurring supporting non-hue compatibility might very well increase. Lighting is something people think they universally understand -- if it doesn't work when they expect it to, they call. In the rest of the "lighting world", people expect the lamp won't have problems working with whatever switch they plug it into. I still hear people confused about CFLs that don't work with their dimmers.

2. The large enough part of the market that they control might be large when that market is limited to "extremely early adopters of this kind of brand-new technology". The market will grow in many stages over the next few years and this is way to early to start giving people another reason to avoid your products.

I'm usually an early adopter of technologies like this, however, I've held off because there were only a handful of implementations out there and the use cases for them was still a "that'd be neat, but not worth the money". I've recently become very interested and will be buying something in the next 6-months, though this is making me reconsider that now.

I know I'm a future customer of this segment of technology -- not just lighting but upgrading my existing home automation system -- and I'm starting with lighting. I'm not, yet, a customer because I haven't found a good mix of "good product", "good interoperability", yet. So they've gained lock-in of all of their early adopters -- a very short-term investment[1] -- and caused the second wave of (in this case, also) early adopters to look elsewhere. They're nowhere close to the market that even high-end, non-smart bulbs command and they won't see much of it this way. People complain today about having to buy special bulbs for their dimmer switches; this is a whole other level -- you can't even use the lamp you just bought. No way someone like my dad is going to be a customer.

I can see how this might improve sales in the very short-term. It also might not. It will increase support calls. It will hurt their ability to get future customers and might even delay the next wave of adoption as people wait for fear of buying something that will become obsolete. These are all the things I'm thinking about as a person who really wants this technology, has the money to buy it, but doesn't have the money to do it twice. And I can live without it for a bit longer.

[1] Short-term because the people who are buying these for the most part have a lot of disposable income or a very small deployment, so switching to something else isn't necessarily as much of a lock-in as they'd like. And this product in particular, the primary consumer is tech folks -- they'll hack together the interoperability eventually, defeating the purpose.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#140
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…

Fine strategy until the universal controller app arrives. After that, the same Boss would hope they should allowed their app to control third party bulbs, since that way at least they would have a brand presence, and by that way that would have allowed them to sell their bulbs better than others.

Boss will be promoted by then because profit went up 150% for two quarters.
Post reply on HN