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Hue Light Hack

atomic14.com

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Re: Hue Light Hack

#61

Post by stagger87 »

humanistbot wrote: post #54

I got a chill of terror when I saw this at #1 on the front page, thinking it was the other meaning of "hack" and that it was some massive vulnerability that is going to ruin my morning while I take my bridge and bulbs offline and make me regret ever buying into it. I know this is Hacker News, but the classic hackers lost that linguistic battle or at least achieved stalemate decades ago. If you're going to use the wor…

If a somewhat vague title gave you a "chill of terror" then I suggest you go back to normal light bulbs. You should assume there is some undisclosed vulnerability. In fact, if you search "Hue light bulb hack" you will find several articles that actually imply what you were scared of...

chills of terror

Re: Hue Light Hack

#62

Post by peterleiser »

stetrain wrote: post #38
aardvarkr wrote: post #29

@OP, what are your thoughts on Dubai bulbs/“ultra efficient” led bulbs? I was annoyed to learn that modern led bulbs are overclocked by design so that they fail quickly, and have been seeking a solution ever since the Dubai bulbs made it to the front page here.

For what it’s worth I’ve been using Hue bulbs for about 10 years and have yet to see a single failure.

Exactly. Phillips is the only smart bulb brand (in my personal experience) that lives up to the lifetime claims on the box. Not a single outage in 7+ years.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#63

Post by GeneralAntilles »

stetrain wrote: post #38
aardvarkr wrote: post #29

@OP, what are your thoughts on Dubai bulbs/“ultra efficient” led bulbs? I was annoyed to learn that modern led bulbs are overclocked by design so that they fail quickly, and have been seeking a solution ever since the Dubai bulbs made it to the front page here.

For what it’s worth I’ve been using Hue bulbs for about 10 years and have yet to see a single failure.

Counterpoint: I've been using Hue bulbs for over 10 years, currently have around 120 lights operating and have had maybe a 5% failure rate (mostly 2nd and 3rd generation A19 bulbs). Flicker due to PSU failure, some completely dead bulbs, some which have lost specific colors in the array (maybe FET failure) so they turn weird colors (like green or purple) at certain white temperature settings.

I suspect the cause is mostly heat-related. As newer bulbs run much cooler I expect reliability will be better, but the product line is definitely not bullet-proof.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#64

Post by dylan604 »

xxpor wrote: post #52
input_sh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the most important ones in my book: you don't need an account to use it and things work fine if you block its access outside your home network.

It also works find with other zigbee stuff (in both directions, you can pair MUCH cheaper Ikea bulbs to the Hue bridge, and pair Hue bulbs to other zigbee coordinators), even if they don't really advertise that.

I've tried using other products that were "cheaper". They work at first, but then issues. First, I bought a compatible bulk LED strip. The listing suggested the power supply to use, but it was way too weak to push the entire strip. Luckily, I bought the strip to cut into sections for using in multiple places. The suggested power supply was still to weak for the smaller sections. Knowing how to calculate the draw per inch of strip length is imperative. Once that was done, the strip itself left a lot to be desired. I bought the proper controller for the RGBWW config, and once synced, the color settings would drift. I would set them in the Hue app, and once happy just forget about it and go about my day. After some time, the color would just be different. After some time, I noticed that one section of my strip had smoked all of the LEDs for one color. Luckily the did not result in a fire, but every LED in this section is clearly burned and obviously no longer working. The other LEDs in the RGBW are working still.

In the end, it would have been cheaper and less time consuming had I just bought the Philips Hue strips.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#65

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tiborsaas wrote: post #48
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #30

> The MCU on the logic board is an Atmel SAM R21, a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ processor with a 2.4GHz ISM band transceiver for Zigbee communication. It has 256KB of Flash and 32KB of SRAM and runs at 48MHz. Excellent; we're getting to the point of lightbulbs having as much compute as computers used to:)

As a fun exercise I'd encourage everyone to count the number of computers they have in their home, being in the walls, bulbs, coffee machines, scales, toothbrushes and eventually Macbooks should all count.

How many do we count laptops as? Do we just count the main cpu, or do we count one more for every hard drive controller, etc.?

Re: Hue Light Hack

#66

Post by andrewaylett »

cschneid wrote: post #46
maxbaines wrote: post #23

I have found Hue to be a rare example of how IoT can be good, they have a pretty open platform using the bridge and api, with good quality if a little pricey product. Be great if hue made a devkit for the kind of projects in the post.

I haven't tried it, but I believe you can even get them into bare zigbee mode, entirely disconnected from the Hue system. At which point, Home Assistant and similar systems can control them directly.

Reset them into pairing mode, and they don't care whether it's a Hue bridge or some other Zigbee controller that adopts them.

Source: recently rebound all my Zigbee lights away from my Hue hub to being directly controlled by Home Assistant.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#67

Post by bombcar »

nfriedly wrote: post #50
bombcar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The different bulbs have different "minimums" I've noticed, but if you really want a nightlight setting you might want to get a dedicated bulb or light for it. The full color at "very low red" are quite low. (Or like me, for my sins, have a single blue LED on a piece of hardware that lights the room bright enough to read by)

I have a PC connected to the TV in my living room with an annoyingly bright blue power light. Even worse, it blinks when the PC is asleep. I ended up taking it apart and wiring in a 470k ohm resistor and three 2.2uf electrolytic capacitors in parallel. The resistor lowers the brightness and the capacitors make it fade in and out a little bit instead of just going on and off. (It still lights up pretty fast, but it fa…

Nice, the really annoying one I just covered with black electrical tape.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#68

Post by xxpor »

Operyl wrote: post #60
xxpor wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also works find with other zigbee stuff (in both directions, you can pair MUCH cheaper Ikea bulbs to the Hue bridge, and pair Hue bulbs to other zigbee coordinators), even if they don't really advertise that.

The only caveat with this is that they don't expose them over Homekit if you do this, you'll need to use Homebridge to get that going.

Ah good to know. I personally only use the hue app itself, Home Assistant, and Alexa, and they all show up in all three by default.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#69

Post by bee_rider »

maxbaines wrote: post #23

I have found Hue to be a rare example of how IoT can be good, they have a pretty open platform using the bridge and api, with good quality if a little pricey product. Be great if hue made a devkit for the kind of projects in the post.

They are pretty convenient for the owners.

It would be sort of nice if the hub would provide a convenient website. Visitors don’t want to use an app to turn on my lightbulbs.

There are button peripherals, which work fine of course, but then it is not much more convenient than a light switch or a remote.

Re: Hue Light Hack

#70

Post by katbyte »

bee_rider wrote: post #69
maxbaines wrote: post #23

I have found Hue to be a rare example of how IoT can be good, they have a pretty open platform using the bridge and api, with good quality if a little pricey product. Be great if hue made a devkit for the kind of projects in the post.

They are pretty convenient for the owners. It would be sort of nice if the hub would provide a convenient website. Visitors don’t want to use an app to turn on my lightbulbs. There are button peripherals, which work fine of course, but then it is not much more convenient than a light switch or a remote.

The tap switch is pretty great, can be placed anywhere, four action buttons, and doesn’t need batteries.

For the most part I use motion sensors and timers and rarely need a switch

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