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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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!
>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.
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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadLong 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.
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.
I can't think of any user friendliness benefit for this. Are you thinking about component cost?
The bulbs have a serial number on them, you just input that serial into the app synced with a new bridge.
I find waking up with the light slowly brightening so much better than an alarm, but just as effective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20314265
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230553
Tangential useful information: Which smart bulbs should you buy (from a security perspective) https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51910.html
Physical reset switch would be great, unless you've got 20 lights all installed in a chandelier 30 feet up.
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")?
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.
* 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.
My father and I implemented all of those features trivially and cheaply in the late 1980s with X10 switches/outlets/fixture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_%28industry_standard%29
X10 devices also featured:
* 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.
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.
It’s infuriating!
Also this reminds me I need to put all my lights on a DMZ.
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.
The problem is badly designed interfaces, not the underlying technology itself.
No one is forced to buy this type of smart bulb.
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.
Well for the rest of us its very huge inconvenience :)
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.
The big failure arguably is not testing the firmware sufficiently (or building in recovery algorithms) to necessitate a reset procedure in the first place.
As to firmware, cosmic rays for example randomly flip bits. Which means for any large scale deployments you want a reset option.
Edit: a source https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4082030_Flash_memor...
any solution has to cost less than a penny ...
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.
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.
These are "smart" light bulbs, so I am guessing you are not supposed to control them by cutting of their power with a physical switch.
Or, you could play that video and follow along and flip a switch a few times.
Which one sounds like a better UX?
Just do this:
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.
Problem solved.
This thread is full of dumb ideas that don't hold up to two seconds of scrutiny.
If Facebook had made the light bulb, you’d have to unfriend the lightbulb for it to reset.
If Google had made the lightbulb, well the reset function would be discontinued.
If Microsoft had made the lightbulb, you’d need to call your active directory admin to perform the 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.
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.
What a time to be alive!
[0] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
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.
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.
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?
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.
Alan Watts predicted our overabundance of goods in the sixties and the problems we will face (and are facing).
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/alan-watts-basic-...
The bottom line is:
who should pay for the basic income?
machines. they do it already.
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.
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 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.
1. If possible, put your bulb in white (hot or cold no matter ...). The reset procedure works better when the bulb is white rather than color.
2. In the steps below, the power is turned off. It is not ON / OFF done using the remote control or the application, but electrical ON / OFF.
3. Your light bulb is off. This is the beginning of the procedure.
4. Turn it on briefly (one second) and turn it off
5. Allow 6 seconds
6. Turn it on a second time briefly (one second) and turn off
7. Allow 6 seconds
8. Turn it on a third time briefly (one second) and turn off
9. Allow 6 seconds
10. Turn it on for a fourth time (12 seconds) and turn off
11. Allow 6 seconds
12. Turn on the fifth time (12 seconds) and turn off
13. Allow 6 seconds
14. Turn it on. The bulb will then reset and flash green. Then it will return to its initial red state.
I never managed to get the bulb to flash green, however somehow I managed to reset the bulb anyway.
So it doesn't just work or not, it works better.
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.
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.
> 50 NT-servers
That was mostly Gates "eating his own dog food"[1]. Using anything other than NT could have been bad optics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_b...
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.
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 did make me realize that class is everywhere, and I'm constantly signaling it despite thinking I'm above caring about it.
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).
On/off 5 (or 6?) times: 1 second off, ½ second on, repeat.
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.
Assuming you would have to unscrew the bulb to get to the reset, which seems likely, yes it would be perfectly safe.
Until you get a small kid that has just learned how light switches work, probably around 2 or 3 years.
Unfortunately, ours made the mistake of just forgetting everything when placed in reset mode, not being recoverable. Still, thankfully the phase was short-lived.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!"
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.
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].
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60440888/
I have much less faith in any lightbulbs ;).
- 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.
That's my 5 minutes worth of reasons. Any more?
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.
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.
The problems of today are strange.
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.
I have a great site for you: check out https://wfmu.org
Utopia Skye Discord: https://discord.gg/hScth5T
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! :)
[1]: Slipmat.io - https://slipmat.io/
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.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329
>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.
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.
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.