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Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

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Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#291
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something must be wrong with it then. My 5s runs great on most recent release. It's axtually better than when I bought it. How many devices get better as they age?

iOS 9 introduced stutters in scrolling performance compared to iOS 8. If you're not sensitive enough to 60fps, you don't notice it. But that silky 60fps animations were the reason why iOS was praised in the first place.

It's not that I'm not sensitive to that, it isn't there on my phone. Well, with one exception and that's an app that I wrote so I suspect the problem may be the implementation.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#292

Am I only one who doesn't see a problem here? Sure it would be nice if company X allowed me to use cheaper Chinese knock-offs with their product, but to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)" In essense Phillips put money into R&D and marketing and if you are to believe the linked article into making smart lightbulbs mainstream. That shit is no…

You might be the only one. What if you bought a car, and after you bought it, the manufacturer of the car announced that they have remotely flashed the car's computer and now you can only drive to work, and if you want to drive anywhere else you have to buy 'tickets' for $5 per trip, or the car will refuse to run. The point is that when you buy a thing, it is yours . When you own a thing, you are within your rights t…

Your car metaphor is completely off. It's not like Philips updated your lights to only light up in specific location.

But cars are a good example, say your automatic shifter breaks. There are no real third party options, you've pretty much got to buy a new one from the manufacturer or by used one. You can still do all normal car things with it you just can't use third party pieces. Same with the lights, they still work, they shine light and do everything that they did before now you JUST can't use third party bulbs with the system.

If you want to go with other shitty analogies say you made a game, something like an MMO that has monthly fees. You sank a lot of money developing the game, the box price isn't high because you know you'll make your money from the monthly fees. You also use money from the monthly fees to improve the game, fix bugs, add content. Now your subscription model is a little strange, it works by players entering a code on your website. They buy it from your online store, get it in their email and use it to get play time. Now let's imagine that your security isn't absolute and some third party figures out how your keycode generator works and they start selling codes for half the price. Now your paying subscriber count is shrinking. What do you do? Do you A) fix the problem which results into many users losing money since they already bought several months worth of play time from this company? or B) leave the system as it is because openness or something like that?

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#293
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS 9 introduced stutters in scrolling performance compared to iOS 8. If you're not sensitive enough to 60fps, you don't notice it. But that silky 60fps animations were the reason why iOS was praised in the first place.

It's not that I'm not sensitive to that, it isn't there on my phone. Well, with one exception and that's an app that I wrote so I suspect the problem may be the implementation.

Well, test it on iOS 8 if you can, because I've noticed that all apps with Listview (don't know how it's called on iOS) stutter when scrolling. Not flick scroll, but when you keep the finger on the screen and swipe and down. For instance Twitter app, Settings app (in Cellular data particularly).

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#294
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Philips Hue system can be easily integrated with other ZigBee-based systems for additional home automation." http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/about-hue/what-hue-is/ Edit: Found a post about this block from Philips: http://www.developers.meethue.com/documentation/friends-hue-...

>Unrelated to the 'Friends of Hue' program, the changes we made in 1.11 to our implementation of scenes exposed a compatibility issue with a limited number of 3rd party lights which stop them properly responding to scenes created in the Philips Hue app. >Philips will not fix this issue as it relates to the implementation of standard ZigBee scenes functionality in the light and would expect this software to be changed…

Yes, as of the changes they just made and disabled all third party lights. Prior to this update there was no 'Friends of Hue' program and third party lights worked. It's a bit disingenuous to act like this was an established program that people knew about prior to intentionally breaking systems that were previously working.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#295
post #280
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't convince me that worsening the experience on a device in 30 minutes (time for OTA update to finish) is to be expected. Example: iOS 9 update. I can tell you that in the late '90s and early aughts, well, they weren't OTA updates; you actually paid for physical disks, but yes, worsening the experience was completely expected. that's why you bought a new computer at the same time. I am telling you it's the s…

No, you upgraded your PC with larger storage, or more RAM. Or if you were a mindless consumer, which my original post is stating, you "upgraded" (bought) to a new PC. And this mentality came over from mobile and is already pioneered on desktop as well (that one company who solders RAM and hard drives now). Speaking of MS, I don't remember if in the last 10 years I had to buy a new GPU or replace whole PC because the…

When the CPU clock speed increases 3-5x in 3 years, upgrading storage or memory is not going to cover that gap. If I recall, my upgrade cycle was something like 1994: 40MHz 486, 1997: 200MHz Pentium, 2001?: 1.xGHz?

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#296
post #280
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't convince me that worsening the experience on a device in 30 minutes (time for OTA update to finish) is to be expected. Example: iOS 9 update. I can tell you that in the late '90s and early aughts, well, they weren't OTA updates; you actually paid for physical disks, but yes, worsening the experience was completely expected. that's why you bought a new computer at the same time. I am telling you it's the s…

No, you upgraded your PC with larger storage, or more RAM. Or if you were a mindless consumer, which my original post is stating, you "upgraded" (bought) to a new PC. And this mentality came over from mobile and is already pioneered on desktop as well (that one company who solders RAM and hard drives now). Speaking of MS, I don't remember if in the last 10 years I had to buy a new GPU or replace whole PC because the…

When the CPU clock speed increases 3-5x in 3 years, upgrading storage or memory is not going to cover that gap. If I recall, my upgrade cycle was something like 1994: 40MHz 486, 1997: 200MHz Pentium, 2001?: 1.xGHz?

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#297
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, earlier today I wrote some MCU code to control my HUE lights, and I figured "hey, why not build a controller to make my christmas lights controlled by the HUE hub". Guess this news answers that. Seen together with the Phillips Hue bulbs I have being noisy as hell, hue just became a lot less interesting. I hope there will be an open source system and manufacturers whose bulbs can easily be integrated. Hopefu…

Do you mean RF noise or audible noise?

Audible noise. Perhaps related to the PWM?

They're somewhat dim as well. Not exactly a quality product.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#298
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something must be wrong with it then. My 5s runs great on most recent release. It's axtually better than when I bought it. How many devices get better as they age?

iOS 9 introduced stutters in scrolling performance compared to iOS 8. If you're not sensitive enough to 60fps, you don't notice it. But that silky 60fps animations were the reason why iOS was praised in the first place.

It's that, but there's a lot more. It's simply very, very slow and seems poor at managing memory. It's difficult to describe, but things that used to respond very quickly (like scrolling between pages on the home screen) are slower than just "sluggish". And often apps don't behave well if I have more than a couple of them open. But it's not all the time, it's just frequent.

Then there is the problem where it doesn't rotate properly. And my first instinct would be to blame the hardware, but in the case of Messenger, it rotates some parts of the screen and not others. But the parts that don't rotate are unresponsive. So I'll sometimes find myself in a situation where I've typed a text, and the message is rotated, but the text box and send button are not, and pressing the send button does nothing until I manage to get the entire thing to rotate by moving it from landscape to portrait and back a few times.

It's also possible there is some cruft I've carried over from previous version (I've upgrade a few times) so I'm going to try a 'fresh' install where I lose all my data and have to redo everything by hand and see if it fixes the problems. But the only problem I had prior to installing iOS 9 was my music not transfering properly, and AFAICT, that is an iTunes problem relating to duplicate tracks that I haven't had time to resolve yet.

If it's not the cruft, I guess I take it back and get a "new" one; maybe a problem with the RAM?

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#299

Am I only one who doesn't see a problem here? Sure it would be nice if company X allowed me to use cheaper Chinese knock-offs with their product, but to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)" In essense Phillips put money into R&D and marketing and if you are to believe the linked article into making smart lightbulbs mainstream. That shit is no…

> to me, they are well within their rights to decide: "hey, we don't want competitors to benefit from our product(s)"

I'd say: the products cease to be theirs when a someone buys them, and the consumer is the one who benefits from being able to choose competitor's products.

Toyota did a lot of work designing my car, but they don't get a monopoly on selling me carpet mats. It's my car and I'll put what I want in there.

> I am sure you can find open{source|hardware} alternative if you don't wish to support Phillips anymore.

True, but if you bought something expecting interoperability and it was "upgraded" to be closed, you'd have a right to be upset.

Re: Philips Hue blocks 3rd party lights

#300
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another vote for Z-Wave. As others have said, the lack of being "open" means that stuff actually interoperates. I'm using a Razberry with an older Raspberry Pi as the controller, and Linear brand in-wall dimmers and lamp modules, plus a motorized drapery system from Somfy. The software that comes with the Razberry acts as a basic controller, but I wrote my own web front-end that talks to their controller over local h…

Domoticz and OpenZWave are actually way more powerful than Razberry, and I'd highly recommend investigating that so that you don't need to keep updating your own controller. Domoticz also has a pretty good scripting (lua) support built-in, so you can automate stuff in a really simple way.

I'm just using razberry as an api to send z-wave commands and occasionally get status updates. I'm writing all my own logic and scripting and stuff in my web front-end (using coffeescript on node). I'm sure I'm duplicating effort, and of course no one will ever reuse my code, but now that I've wrapped the basics of the razberry api, it's easier for me to just code more logic than to learn someone else's framework.

(I'm also integrating a handful of devices I built myself from esp8266's, that communicate over basic http over wifi. I wonder if those could be integrated into one of those frameworks easily?)

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