Not surprising. Philips consumer electronics, or whatever is left of it anyway, is now just a licensing/branding company who earns money for putting their name brand on various Chinese OEM brands, much like consumer electronics from Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, Braun, Blaupunkt, Grundig, AEG, Tefal, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sharp, NEC, Sanyo, etc.
My experience with Hue bulbs and lights is that although they are more expensive, they are of MUCH higher quality - better light intensity and temperature control, longer lasting.
I highly doubt the ability to turn my lights off over a network will destroy the world.
And if you're concerned about internet access, there are plenty of hubs for smart projects that don't need internet access. Some don't even need or have wifi capability, but can be wired physically into a dmz with an open source home automation system like Home Assistant. There are USB dongles with Zigbee support as well that you plug straight into your open source based home automation box if you want.
That said: Most people just don't care most of the time, because for most peoples use the worst possible consequence is being slightly inconvenienced.
E.g. should my Lightwave RF gateway get bricked, the worst case scenario is that my Lightwave switches revert to being dumb switches and I'll be slightly annoyed I won't be able to voice control them.
Hardly world-destroying stuff.
What's slightly different here is that this is a new move for Hue (it's not for any number of other smart home providers people happily sign up for online services from), and so some subset of their customers will feel compelled to switch zigbee bridges and incur a cost. (But if you're price sensitive, why the hell are you using Hue in the first place?)
No, because I don't want my termostat to switch off, my clocks to reset, my home server to go down every time I go to the shops or have a meeting. And no, I'm not about to rewire the house to provide isolated circuits just for the things I don't want to switch off, when I could instead just replace a few light switches and plug in a few smart plugs.
I can assure you pretty much nobody goes to their fuse board and trips the main switch even when going on holiday, much less during their day to day life. Many of the people who don't do that still tend to turn off as much as possible when leaving the house.
Seems like cheap auto off timers and simple motion detector lights would solve all those problems with 1970s technology and no network connections at all.
If you always leave and come back at same time, sure. If you dont, fiddling with timer to turn on power just because you got off work early would be a bit of a bother.
Motion detectors generally makes things less convenient, not more. Now I have to wave my arms around regularly. No thanks. I'll take the network connections any day - the user experience is far superior before getting into that this was just one example.
Some have heater that keeps it warm indefinitely. We had mechanical timer for that one in our old job.
Well, it was reason why it was installed, but what actually was used for is that we set up coffee to brew before leaving work and the timer turned it on right before people started coming to the office so we were welcomed by smell of fresh coffee
There's an EU law that actually dictates that all coffee machines should turn off.
But I still don't trust it. I need to do the Japanese train conductor pointing and vocalising thing when turning stuff off when I leave the house for a longer time =)
Honestly? This is what sold me on them. That might not make sense to everyone, but at more northern latitudes it's really nice to have them come on before you get home and before you wake up.
I do have real use-case, though : lights on a cable system, but long enough to light different areas (dining table AND couch, for instance). It's quite convenient to be able to control each area separately, instead of needing to turn them all on or all off.
Hue lights are zigbee. There are zigbee USB controllers, and they're supported by Home Assistant etc., so if you want you can easily enough set it up totally isolated and firewalled off. You just won't be able to use the official app and bridge.
I'm slowly moving control to a Hubitat (https://hubitat.com/). But still use the Hue hub for the noisy (frequent messages) Hue bulbs. Anyone have any alternatives?
You will need a Zigbee Hub for sure, but it doesn't need to be Philips Hue hub.
Folks have used ConBee II or Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle to replace Hue hub.
I have used Sonoff Zigbeen to replace Ikea hub, bot haven't got around to replacing Hue hub just yet. It's on my list :-)
When colleagues, friends, and students say they are getting into IoT it's becoming hard for me to feign interest or excitement when this is what that industry is moving towards.
Flashing those devices to more open software (thanks to the fact vast majority is just esp8/32 with some extra electronics) also often requires opening them which is pita.
This is a disappointing if not unexpected update. I currently have a hue bridge for some hue ambiance bulbs but also have control through HA. There have been some needed bulb updates (improving the stability of last color temp and state on power on) but I will soon fully transition over to HA with a zigbee adapter because of stuff like this.
It's a quite powerful tool to integrate a variety of different smart home devices into one location and share them between ecosystems.
I have a wifi thermostat that requires a dedicated app and does not allow for Apple Home integration. With Home Assistant I installed an integration for that thermostat, then shared it with the Apple Home bridge (also an integration) and quickly was able to allow my iphone/automations etc, to modify the thermostat. And that's only scratching the surface and something that took a few minutes.
I've just ordered an adapter with the aim to do the same. Hue products have been great due to their quality (often at an extra expense I've deemed worthwhile) and their local-only functionality, but this change indicates it's time to stop buying their products and move things away from their control while it's still possible.
Jokes apart, it's doable when people still haven't bought anything, but the frustration that I wish was changed is the change in terms and conditions that affects hardware functioning at a level where it's either you selling your data or you being unable to use the hardware, hardware that could also generate e-waste if thrown away
Always going to be a race to the bottom unless the consumer has rights to repair and modify their own devices. Otherwise products that lean on either ad-based or subscription recurring revenue can always undercut products that don't at retail. Make this shit impractical because anyone can install 3rd party firmware that disables the subscription DRM and the problem will go away.
I have noticed the announcement of the change too. This materially changes the product for me. I was a happy user so far, and was thinking about buying more bulbs in fact, but not anymore.
Is there a way to force the company to return the money I have paid for my bulbs and hub so far? Even if it is arduous and cost me more money than I'm able to gain back I would be inclined to do it to signal my displeasure with this change.
Possible. But I guess I should maybe wait for the change to actually happen, then send the equipment back to them and ask for a refund, and only sue them if they are not refunding me?
Fortunately all of their lights work over a standard Zigbee connection. No need for a Hue Hub or App at all. I was already transitioning my lights from using the Hue Hub/App to directly connecting via Zigbee/HomeAssistant before this was announced.
yes, I use home assistant cause I don't need any cloud based stuff for it to work, though I did have to buy a raspi and a zigbee stick to run it on (or if you have some extra hardware laying about, I just like having it separated from my other stuff). I have a few cloud based things attached to it, but I'm selective and don't buy things where essential functionality requires it, but it's a extra & optional feature on something I was going to buy anyways (and that I don't care if data is shared on, like my automatic litter box dump box being full).
You need a coordinator talking to the zigbee bulbs, in most cases this is a usb-dongle for $20-50. Zigbee2mqtt has a great list of different dongles and their pros/cons. The other functionality of a propriatary hub will be fulfilled by home assistant or Zigbee2mqtt+nodered.
Yes but there are USB Zigbee dangles that will serve this need. You don't need another box and power supply, there are multiple brands to choose from, and no cloud account or goddamn SMS confirmation needed.
Wiz bulbs use ESP-NOW (so that the Wiz remote can communicate with them). They also have an ESP-WROOM-02 inside (a package integrating an ESP-8266EX).
The fact that they use ESP-NOW means they can be controlled (theoretically) by any ESP* that has ESP-NOW support. So far, folks have only managed to go the other way—to intercept remote key presses [0]—but I imagine it won’t be long before they suss out control of the bulbs.
Also the wiz bulbs have one feature that most others don't have: they get their last state back after a power outage. If there's one thing you don't want, it's a full bright room after a brownout in the middle of the night!
All Hue lights have this option. You can select different power-on behaviours. "Power loss recovery" is the setting you are describing. It stays off if it was off, and turns back on if it was on.
The default is "Warm white, full brightness", probably mostly to avoid confused people sending back bulbs because they flipped the switch ON and the bulb remained dark. Since traditionally that meant a failed bulb.
Those WiZ bulbs have actually been pretty reliable for me in the few years I’ve had them. Pretty early on I set them up to be controlled by Home Assistant [1], and they are on par with my other Hue devices in terms of performance (maybe not a 100% match in brightness, but close enough). Definitely worth their much cheaper price to me.
Hue light switches (well, the ones I have) simply stick on the wall with no wiring.
The _real_ light switch is permanently on, and the _hue_ light switch sends a beacon to the hub to turn the configured lights on/off (the light bulb socket is always-on)
No, some switchers and dimmers can also control lights without a hub present. Some products come as a paired bulb and switch, with only an optional suggestion that you later extend into the ecosystem.
This is not true. Look into Zigbee binding, it works when the coordinator is offline.
I'm using that as a backup solution in my house. All lights are zigbee, permanently powered, normally most are controlled automatically by presence sensors. But I have a couple of Zigbee remotes in a box that are bound directly to the lights to use in case my home automation system is down.
Yes! This is called binding in zigbee parlance. I have a couple of ikea bulbs and switches and, if memory serves me, you can bind up to 10 bulbs to a single switch.
Right: It's not the companies' fault they're engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices; they're profit-maximizing machines. They don't care about trust or know what it is.
It's our fault we're letting them do that. Bad behavior should be affecting profits. Probably through regulation.
But that's not how it effectively works at scale. It only takes a single person not bound by morals to mess it up for everyone. Those people naturally float to the top and are loved by shareholders (hence who's in charge at most places).
Individually the organisation is made up of people, but at large it's a big anonymous machine because those people are rewarded super-duper one-dimensionally: Help profits and you're rewarded or hurt them and you're out.
It makes about as much sense to anthropomorphise corporations as it does to anthropomorphise lawnmowers. They can not feel empathy.
> But that's not how it effectively works at scale. It only takes a single person not bound by morals to mess it up for everyone.
The onus might be on us as the public to change the laws to outlaw bad behaviour, but this does not absolve the companies, and especially the people within them who conduct, condone, or reward deceptive and unfair business practices.
> Right: It's not the companies' fault they're engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices; they're profit-maximizing machines. They don't care about trust or know what it is.
this is an extremely dumb take, of course the people working at companies are responsible for bad dumb decisions that make their products worse.
There is a somewhat strangely named German brand that sells private IoT door / security cams. Forgot the name, sadly. They’re quite expensive though. My guess is they might sell private lightbulbs.
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.
You might be thinking of the Homematic IP line, great products for home automation, they also have door locks etc. They are also compatible with just Homematic which doesn't use the internet (so no IoT), but rather a local gateway for controlling the devices. I don't think they have lightbulbs though. The company name is eQ-3
Homematic has a pretty good reputation. Their stuff is reliable and they're quite open to DIYers. In turn the products are a bit on the expensive side, but not wildly so.
Word of warning about Netatmo cameras - even if you buy the HomeKit Secure Video ones, they stop working if the memory card dies. And it dies a LOT on their cameras. I've got 3 of their outdoor security cameras, and two of them stopped working while I was away on holiday. I had a very long conversation with them about this massive flaw in their system, they kept just saying "it needs the memory card to save the video" - I pointed out that a) it doesn't, it's streaming to HSV, and b) with every other camera I own the memory card is optional. The quality of the video on them is also considerably worse than any of my other cameras.
Good to know! I have been using Logitech circle view with HomeKit secure video with no problems other than needing to make sure wifi strength is plentiful.
Ideally, there would be a wired HomeKit secure video option, but I have yet to see it.
I have a Logitech cam too and it's been trouble free with a great picture, though for some reason it does seem to take longer to start streaming on my iPhone than the other cameras. I was really hoping for some big improvements in Home / HomeKit with iOS 17 but alas, no.
True, I have a wired Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub but it does seem to just change on a whim from time to time - there's about 15 candidate hubs in the house!
> Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub
How?
I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one?
I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
It's a royal pain in the arse, but it involves unplugging every candidate hub and plugging them back in again in the preferred order. Can't say for sure, but I think the points where my preferred order has changed without me doing anything were down to very short power cuts during the night, when that happens, you get whichever device boots back up first as your primary hub.
Depends on how DIY you want to go - i got a Dahua VTO-something doorbell that is powered by PoE that in turn is bridged into HomeKit/HKSV via Scrypted - works pretty darn well :)
Scrypted supports quite a few cameras, doorbells etc...
Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect (!!). They know more about people than their parents do.
Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers, as we all arbitrarily doing things like blocking streaming of audio from your phone.
Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
> Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers
Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products.
I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Sonos doesn’t have tracking. That’s my entire point. And it’s extremely ironic you call Bose “no strings attached”, that’s what Sonos is about in the most literal sense.
You pay a huge premium in trade for less wires, great multi-room audio, decent sound and a long support timeline.
I will say that I hope Sonos and Google bury the axe at some point, and the Cast (or at least DIAL) protocol gets added.
On the planet I live on, Sonos does obnoxious tracking. There is no direct communication between client and speaker at all - everything calls/is routed via home. Moreover client on mobile requires and will refuse to run setup until you grant it precise location permissions. It's a spaghetti of strings attached.
Bose and other bluetooth speakers don't have any strings attached because:
* you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it
* you don't have to have account with them to use it
* you don't have to grant tracking permissions to use it
* manufacturer can decide to discontinue product or go bankrupt - it doesn't matter, you can still use product as you did before, you're unaffected
* you don't have to worry about software deprecation - new versions of sonos client for iOS require recent versions of Apple devices - you can't install client on older phones/tablets to use your speaker
> Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect
Tangential PSA: Red Sea (aquatics) does/did this too. I can't control the lights on my fucking aquarium without all four of them being connected to the internet over wifi and managed through an account registered with an app with location sharing enabled. Only the iOS app worked; the Android version was completely broken.
The app lets you group lights and model the lighting curves however you want but there's no reason this couldn't have been done over Zigbee. I assume my LAN is now part of some Mossad botnet.
And yet they're one of the few (only?) smart speaker that does locally processed commands. You and everyone else downvoting me are unknowledgeable clowns.
https://smart-life24.de/ perhaps? They do sell light bulbs. They're not particularly expensive. I think you might need an account with the Smart Life app, and my girlfriend appears to have a proper account using her e-mail address, but my user ID appears to be a random string, so I guess that's somewhat private?!
I haven’t used Hue bulbs since their first products, so I can’t really compare, but I have had no problems with IKEA bulbs or switches in terms of quality and features.
My only issue is that their Tradfri outlets are too big and poorly shaped. I can only fit small plugs next to them (in US outlets).
Shelly [0] seems trustworthy enough. In any case, if they ever go full-on enshittified, as long as you don't update the firmware you should be able to keep using your stuff.
Anything you can flash Tasmota [1] on should be good to go as well. I believe that includes all or most Shelly devices as well.
my ikea stuff is pretty reliable, they seem conservative on adding features, but if you don't care about those specific features (which you probably don't) they've been pretty great, if not always the nicest design for the buttons/controllers.
Shelly seems very good so far. No need to connect it to the cloud at all, or use their app, since you can configure the via an onboard web UI (well, they'll still check for firmware updates when you connect them to Wi-Fi, but that's it). They can be controlled from Home Assistant completely without internet.
Of course, there's no guarantee for future products, but once they're set up they're not gonna change unless you go in and update their firmware.
From what I can see most of their products (all?) are z-wave, so even if they try to change as long as they don't break the z-wave support, you can buy a z-wave USB dongle and drop whatever wants to be directly connected to your network anyway.
None of the Shelly devices I have are z-wave, they are all Wi-Fi entirely. This includes several of the Shelly 1 power management in-wall relays, several of the Shelly external power management plugs of the kind that you plug into an outlet, a few of the Shelly in-wall dimmers/fan controllers and a couple Shelly bulbs.
I think if these had Z-Wave they would have cost a few dollars more each, due to licensing. It would be nice because I do have a Z-Wave mesh up and running alongside a zigbee mesh and a few oddball Wi-Fi only devices like these shellies, but they work well enough with home assistant that I don't consider to be a drawback yet.
The only thing I wish they could do better is expose more of their configurable options via whatever API they present to home assistant. A couple of these devices speak mqtt which opens up a few more capabilities, but there are still many fine-tuning aspects like controlling the way a switch attached to the device functions, i.e. whether it behaves as if it is detached or functional - useful with toddlers around) are invisible unless you are using the built-in web configuration page.
I'm sure the right answer is open source stuff, self-hosted. But as an alternative, the Apple Homekit architecture does seem serious about keepig as much info as possible on the devices themselves and not throwing stuff into the cloud.
Maybe that's why the number of smart devices that work with Homekit is so limited?
I really don't understand many of the "smart" device manufacturers. They clearly aren't capable of running the services required to manage their devices, so why do they keep insisting on doing so? My parents have a smart radiator that couldn't be managed for over a month because a server in Norway was down. Why not just have it be manageable by Homekit and skip the infrastructure cost?
Money for one but there is little actual standarization that have enough clout for it to happen.
99% of IoT devices would be fine with just "here is MQTT address" and a way to push updates (preferably with gateway downloading updates and devices updating only from gateway)
Buy based on protocols, and then focus on whether the bridges are trustworthy.
That is, be cautious about anything that will directly link to your wifi (and so doesn't need a bridge) unless you can confirm you can isolate them on their own wifi network or firewall them off should you feel the need to now or in the future, or anything that uses proprietary protocols where you can't rip out the bridge if the provider goes rogue.
Hue bulbs uses zigbee, so the bulbs themselves are not a problem. The bridge is. There are "dumb" zigbee bridges/interfaces, including USB controllers you can use with open source options like Home Assistant.
If you can't avoid a proprietary bridge, only buy what you can afford to replace, or where the device is still serviceable to a sufficient degree if you turn off/remove the bridge (e.g. Lightwave switches go "dumb" if you turn off the bridge, but still work), or if you firewall it (e.g. if you can still control it via wifi even if the bridge can't reach the internet).
There’s no such thing as trusting a brand - trust community effort only. That’s my rule where possible. If stuff doesnt work end to end with open solutions i am not buying it. I mean these companies take our money and then treat us as if we are the product?
Since the official Android app indeed refused to control my bulbs w/o an account lately, on my new phone, I switched to the HuePro 3rd party app and so far things seem to work fine.
So if I'm not using the Hue app, am I affected? That's what isn't particularly clear from the post or the comments here. If you're already using their app, is it so onerous to get an account? (I might or might not get an account, the Hue kit is already sitting on my shelf collecting dust, but I was thinking of using Urbit or some other open source project to resurrect it soon... so does this affect us?)
My bulbs use Bluetooth or ZigBee, and have never needed the Hue hub or the app, as I’ve used Home Assistant with them the whole time. Currently using the app because I need to rebuild HA, and it doesn’t seem like the change effects the bulbs themselves. However you do need the app to install firmware updates, so that would force the account usage if you wanted to stay up to date.
Does anyone know if they can force users to do so in EU? It sounds like it's gonna make the product unusable if not registered, therefore revoking my previous rights to use a product without an account.
It seems to me that they're about to force the users to hand out personally identifiable information that is not strictly necessary for the product to work (as evidenced by the fact that it did work without for several years). So there should be an opt-out.
If you buy a product you should be able to use it even if you completely break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.
Not where I live. Can you be more specific? I have never seen a jurisdiction where a sales tax (eg GST or VAT) exempts services. That would be an administrative and enforcement nightmare.
Pretty much any home automation that supports zigbee or z-wave already provides this for everything except their bridges, though. And that includes Hue.
While I'd happily support regulating tethering as well, because it'd certainly make some things easier, with a little bit of thought you can build out home automation where it's all under your control. E.g. stick to zigbee and z-wave devices as the default, and get dumb zigbee and z-wave USB dongles, and connect them to an open source bridge, like Home Assistant, and you've got a good start.
It is, but it's a small one, typically both in cost and number. E.g. I have 5 led strips, half a dozen smart plugs, about 40 bulbs, and a dozen smart switches, and 5 smart radiator valves/thermostats. Replacing a bridge with Home Assistant and a 10 pound USB dongle isn't the problem if everything else speaks open protocols. As I said, I wouldn't object to requiring untethering ability even for those, but requiring open protocols for the other devices is more important.
Most of the above is Zigbee, which is open, but some is Tado and Lightwave, and if they go rogue it'd suck to replace the devices rather than just the hubs.
I think this is a distinction without a difference unless there's something legally relevant to that distinction. I don't disagree semantically, but I also doubt Phillips cares whether they call their lightbulbs a product or a service.
My solution would be to require refunds for hardware if the underlying software materially changes in terms of features, excepting safety features (I'm fine with disabling features because of an unknown risk of fire or something).
To me, the underlying issue is information asymmetry. The vendor knows when they're going to make changes, and users don't. The vendor knows which features get used and which don't, impacting the features they change, but users would have to guess whether they're a major usecase or not. The vendor likely has a list of lines in the sand they won't cross, but users don't know where those are.
Those used to be irrelevant because it wasn't possible to live-update the features of hardware, but it has become relevant. The free market is lacking information to make informed purchasing decisions.
Whenever I read something like this I sometimes wonder if there is a viable model for a consumer electronics company which works akin to a non-profit that has irrevocable principles it has to follow where something like this won't happen and where shareholder value, buy outs and angel investors can't force the company to become like that.
A company that makes use of open standards and hardware, respects right to repair, user privacy, local/offline first, open sources its hardware and software, works with sustainable ecofriendly materials and processes whereever possible, has a transparent and fair salary structure and open inclusive company culture and won't engage in toxic or anti-competitive behaviour.
Now I realise that a lot of those points are not as clear cut and products would probably cost a bunch more but somehow I would prefer that. What do you guys think?
The whole IoT world is a huge mess. A large number of the products are a massive privacy nightmare, security is questionable in interoperability is a pipe dream.
I have an old house, where it location of a few switches are just completely illogical. One solution would be to install a few "smart" switches and a relay or two. If I want to stay secure and care the least bit about cost and privacy, there's no choice other than run an open source gateway solution, funnily enough it's also the only solution that will work with almost everything.
Zigbee Sonoff relays paired to one of their coordinators flashed with Tasmota. Although if the walls are too thick or tge sistances too high it could pose an issue for 2.4Ghz.
I have actually looked at Sonoff, but they won't fit into the wall. In order to fit into classic Danish design tradition our wall mounts/boxes are slightly to small to fit anything not specifically design for them. Our switches and socket looks a lot nice than anything I've seen from the US, EU or UK, but they are special little snowflakes.
There's an entire cottage industry and hobby scene around making 3D print and modifications to Ikea, Hue and other switches so that they'll look like "the real thing".
Even the mini modules? Maybe put them in the wall dose above the switch? Shellys are even larger. Sonoff seems to put out more miniaturized models every year.
ffs, who is thinking of this shit. personally i don't own any and now i certainly won't. Smart homes are a great example of a good idea with a shitty implementation.
Since I don't see it mentioned here I would like to suggest z-wave (protocol) and the accompanying ecosystem as an alternative.
I have multiple lights, power plugs and sensors operating on z-wave being controlled by Home Assistant. None of these require me to log into a third party app or service.
ZigBee is the open protocol that most people should try to prefer to support open standards. But both Zwave and ZigBee are local-only, so either one is better than something that can call home on the internet.
I've noticed a lot of z-wave adopters seem to be shifting towards zigbee. I guess because it is closer to thread and matter? Some devices seem to be upgradeable for that too.
This is frustrating. I have invested a lot in the Hue ecosystem and have also recommended it to my friends based on the facts that you don't need an account to control it, it integrates easily with HA, and you can block it from the internet.
Now after one announcement it's something I want to get rid of fast and am ashamed of recommending it to my friends. I already block my Hue Bridge from accessing the internet, so that should keep it from updating so that the functionality stays the same.
Does anyone have any good app recommendations for Android? I use HA, but last time I checked you weren't able to configure the actual Hue scenes in it (and using HA scenes triggered Hue's spam limits).
you basically need to recreate the scenes in home assistant and use the hue bridge as as dumb of a bridge as you can. There should be little to no things that home assistant scenes can't do that hue scenes can.
I'll still probably recommend hue light bulbs with the caveat that I don't recommend their bridge/app, compared to the other bulbs I've used they are much more reliable and handle color changes much more smoothly & consistently.
I haven't used anything but Hue, but I've been looking to get off them because they're so unreliable. Like clockwork, one or two bulbs go bad every year and will still be dimly lit even when "off", or worse still they will start flickering constantly when "off". It's kind of depressing if something with such poor quality is the most reliable option out there. :(
The type of behavior you describe might be related to your electricity setup in combination with generic LED behavior.
I've had this behavior on a physical dimmer switch and an ordinary cheap LED. It couldn't be turned off. Somehow the dimmer always feeds it some power, which the LED responds to. If that low power is at the edge of its "activation power", you're effectively rapidly turning it on and off.
This kills any LED. LEDs die from actuations far before they die from hours in use. Hue bulbs are praised for their reliability, so something is off.
In my case, I changed the physical dimmer into an ordinary light switch. That fixed it.
Yeah unfortunately I haven't been able to find a fix. I know that dimmer switches are a common culprit, but we don't have them. And regular dumb LED bulbs have worked just fine in the same fixtures where we've had trouble with Hue. In principle I like the product a lot, so I'm hoping I can figure out what is going on at some point
Anecdata but I have about 20 Hue bulbs of various color types I've owned for several years and have had no failures. I do wish the button switches wouldn't eat through coin cell batteries though.
In the Polish comedy film "Miś" ("Teddy Bear"), released in 1981, there is a famous line: "We don't have your coat, what are you going to do about it?"
This line is uttered in a cloakroom scene. In the scene, the protagonist Ryszard Ochódzki goes to a cloakroom to retrieve his coat. He hands over his ticket to the attendants. They search but claim they can't find his coat. Ochódzki becomes agitated but the attendants are nonchalant.
The scene satirizes inefficiency and lack of accountability in bureaucratic systems.
Hue's "take it or leave it" answers ("Believe us, this change can only benefit the users, when it comes to security.") about their recent changes feel kinda the same. The message seems to be, "We're changing this and what are you going to do about it?"
It's scary how a movie about life in communist Poland can still feel relevant when dealing with companies today.
Brazil is the other end of that spectrum; the intro scene where an embedded bureaucrat loses their, ahem, proverbial shit over a fly and the physical altercation with said fly (literal insect: fly) impacts a printing of "state assault/guilty citizen targets," the result being a chain of events that would have otherwise never taken place. great movie.
Maybe one day we'll speak about these silos and systems the same way we speak about the communist bureaucracies of old. Minus the crimes against humanity and all.
Perhaps centralization is the problem? I can't help but think all those people in crypto that said "we buy into the protocol, not the coin!" were onto something after all.
My Hue lights have never been connected to the Internet, so they'll never have to worry about this. I use my own Perl client: https://www.floodgap.com/software/huepl/
I might not buy another base station again, though, if this gets enforced at that level.
Enforcing it at the bridge level would break so many setups, apps, custom integrations that even if they try this, they'll dial it back from the avalanche of outrage.
It reminds me of the transition of dumb phones where we would transfer files to one another using direct Bluetooth. Then the era of cloud storage came and you would upload to the cloud to transfer to someone next to you. Then we reinvented sending to the device next to you with things like AirDrop and Nearby Share but alas they’re not interoperable.
The app allows me to skip the login/create account step (at least in central europe). I also asked local support about this and they told me it should not require account in the future, unless I want to use philips secure
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadIt's not critically important, but the many individually small conveniences add up.
And if you're concerned about internet access, there are plenty of hubs for smart projects that don't need internet access. Some don't even need or have wifi capability, but can be wired physically into a dmz with an open source home automation system like Home Assistant. There are USB dongles with Zigbee support as well that you plug straight into your open source based home automation box if you want.
That said: Most people just don't care most of the time, because for most peoples use the worst possible consequence is being slightly inconvenienced.
E.g. should my Lightwave RF gateway get bricked, the worst case scenario is that my Lightwave switches revert to being dumb switches and I'll be slightly annoyed I won't be able to voice control them.
Hardly world-destroying stuff.
What's slightly different here is that this is a new move for Hue (it's not for any number of other smart home providers people happily sign up for online services from), and so some subset of their customers will feel compelled to switch zigbee bridges and incur a cost. (But if you're price sensitive, why the hell are you using Hue in the first place?)
I can assure you pretty much nobody goes to their fuse board and trips the main switch even when going on holiday, much less during their day to day life. Many of the people who don't do that still tend to turn off as much as possible when leaving the house.
Then I remembered I have cats.
Having the lights turn off automatically when there's nobody home is also nice though.
Well, it was reason why it was installed, but what actually was used for is that we set up coffee to brew before leaving work and the timer turned it on right before people started coming to the office so we were welcomed by smell of fresh coffee
But I still don't trust it. I need to do the Japanese train conductor pointing and vocalising thing when turning stuff off when I leave the house for a longer time =)
I have used Sonoff Zigbeen to replace Ikea hub, bot haven't got around to replacing Hue hub just yet. It's on my list :-)
The problem tends to be that all of them want to sucker you into using their apps or bridges to tie it all together.
It's entirely avoidable, but most users don't know what to look for.
It's a quite powerful tool to integrate a variety of different smart home devices into one location and share them between ecosystems.
I have a wifi thermostat that requires a dedicated app and does not allow for Apple Home integration. With Home Assistant I installed an integration for that thermostat, then shared it with the Apple Home bridge (also an integration) and quickly was able to allow my iphone/automations etc, to modify the thermostat. And that's only scratching the surface and something that took a few minutes.
I voted with my money and when I needed a printer for my dad I got a Brother.
And what's his name? :D
Jokes apart, it's doable when people still haven't bought anything, but the frustration that I wish was changed is the change in terms and conditions that affects hardware functioning at a level where it's either you selling your data or you being unable to use the hardware, hardware that could also generate e-waste if thrown away
Is there a way to force the company to return the money I have paid for my bulbs and hub so far? Even if it is arduous and cost me more money than I'm able to gain back I would be inclined to do it to signal my displeasure with this change.
The fact that they use ESP-NOW means they can be controlled (theoretically) by any ESP* that has ESP-NOW support. So far, folks have only managed to go the other way—to intercept remote key presses [0]—but I imagine it won’t be long before they suss out control of the bulbs.
[0]: https://github.com/jesserockz/wizmote-esphome
The default is "Warm white, full brightness", probably mostly to avoid confused people sending back bulbs because they flipped the switch ON and the bulb remained dark. Since traditionally that meant a failed bulb.
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wiz/
The _real_ light switch is permanently on, and the _hue_ light switch sends a beacon to the hub to turn the configured lights on/off (the light bulb socket is always-on)
I'm using that as a backup solution in my house. All lights are zigbee, permanently powered, normally most are controlled automatically by presence sensors. But I have a couple of Zigbee remotes in a box that are bound directly to the lights to use in case my home automation system is down.
Honestly is there any IoT brand that we can trust long-term? Maybe IKEA stuff?
Not really. I do not use incandescent bulbs nor bulbs that require account. You've chosen 216 and you'll find it everywhere in nature.
It's our fault we're letting them do that. Bad behavior should be affecting profits. Probably through regulation.
Companies are not sentient “profit-maximizing machines, they’re a collection of people. And it’s people making the decisions.
Individually the organisation is made up of people, but at large it's a big anonymous machine because those people are rewarded super-duper one-dimensionally: Help profits and you're rewarded or hurt them and you're out.
It makes about as much sense to anthropomorphise corporations as it does to anthropomorphise lawnmowers. They can not feel empathy.
The onus might be on us as the public to change the laws to outlaw bad behaviour, but this does not absolve the companies, and especially the people within them who conduct, condone, or reward deceptive and unfair business practices.
this is an extremely dumb take, of course the people working at companies are responsible for bad dumb decisions that make their products worse.
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.
Fun fact: eQ-3 is a subsidiary of the DIY electronics store ELV: https://www.eq-3.com/about-eq-3.html
https://www.netatmo.com/
Ideally, there would be a wired HomeKit secure video option, but I have yet to see it.
How?
I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one?
I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
Scrypted supports quite a few cameras, doorbells etc...
Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
I have many devices and use them every day - but if I had a clean slate I don't think I'd buy them again.
Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products.
I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Get Bose or something similar - they'll just keep working without strings attached/tracking/on-the-road/etc forever.
ps. I'm happily using 10y+ old iMac 27" with popOS - works great.
You pay a huge premium in trade for less wires, great multi-room audio, decent sound and a long support timeline.
I will say that I hope Sonos and Google bury the axe at some point, and the Cast (or at least DIAL) protocol gets added.
Bose and other bluetooth speakers don't have any strings attached because:
* you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it
* you don't have to have account with them to use it
* you don't have to grant tracking permissions to use it
* manufacturer can decide to discontinue product or go bankrupt - it doesn't matter, you can still use product as you did before, you're unaffected
* you don't have to worry about software deprecation - new versions of sonos client for iOS require recent versions of Apple devices - you can't install client on older phones/tablets to use your speaker
Tangential PSA: Red Sea (aquatics) does/did this too. I can't control the lights on my fucking aquarium without all four of them being connected to the internet over wifi and managed through an account registered with an app with location sharing enabled. Only the iOS app worked; the Android version was completely broken.
The app lets you group lights and model the lighting curves however you want but there's no reason this couldn't have been done over Zigbee. I assume my LAN is now part of some Mossad botnet.
Anything you can flash Tasmota [1] on should be good to go as well. I believe that includes all or most Shelly devices as well.
IKEA so far seems like a decent bet as well.
[0] https://shellystore.co.uk/ [1] https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
Of course, there's no guarantee for future products, but once they're set up they're not gonna change unless you go in and update their firmware.
I think if these had Z-Wave they would have cost a few dollars more each, due to licensing. It would be nice because I do have a Z-Wave mesh up and running alongside a zigbee mesh and a few oddball Wi-Fi only devices like these shellies, but they work well enough with home assistant that I don't consider to be a drawback yet.
The only thing I wish they could do better is expose more of their configurable options via whatever API they present to home assistant. A couple of these devices speak mqtt which opens up a few more capabilities, but there are still many fine-tuning aspects like controlling the way a switch attached to the device functions, i.e. whether it behaves as if it is detached or functional - useful with toddlers around) are invisible unless you are using the built-in web configuration page.
Raspberry, Arduino and others: Release some awesome open-sourced hardware standard for the smart home: lighting, measuring, interfacing!
Or does something already exist?
I really don't understand many of the "smart" device manufacturers. They clearly aren't capable of running the services required to manage their devices, so why do they keep insisting on doing so? My parents have a smart radiator that couldn't be managed for over a month because a server in Norway was down. Why not just have it be manageable by Homekit and skip the infrastructure cost?
Why don't companies offer better, longer-lasting products that can be community-driven after EOL? Because money.
99% of IoT devices would be fine with just "here is MQTT address" and a way to push updates (preferably with gateway downloading updates and devices updating only from gateway)
That is, be cautious about anything that will directly link to your wifi (and so doesn't need a bridge) unless you can confirm you can isolate them on their own wifi network or firewall them off should you feel the need to now or in the future, or anything that uses proprietary protocols where you can't rip out the bridge if the provider goes rogue.
Hue bulbs uses zigbee, so the bulbs themselves are not a problem. The bridge is. There are "dumb" zigbee bridges/interfaces, including USB controllers you can use with open source options like Home Assistant.
If you can't avoid a proprietary bridge, only buy what you can afford to replace, or where the device is still serviceable to a sufficient degree if you turn off/remove the bridge (e.g. Lightwave switches go "dumb" if you turn off the bridge, but still work), or if you firewall it (e.g. if you can still control it via wifi even if the bridge can't reach the internet).
All I can find is references to something posted on twitter, which I refuse to accept as official communication.
If you buy a product you should be able to use it even if you completely break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.
While I'd happily support regulating tethering as well, because it'd certainly make some things easier, with a little bit of thought you can build out home automation where it's all under your control. E.g. stick to zigbee and z-wave devices as the default, and get dumb zigbee and z-wave USB dongles, and connect them to an open source bridge, like Home Assistant, and you've got a good start.
Most of the above is Zigbee, which is open, but some is Tado and Lightwave, and if they go rogue it'd suck to replace the devices rather than just the hubs.
I think this is a distinction without a difference unless there's something legally relevant to that distinction. I don't disagree semantically, but I also doubt Phillips cares whether they call their lightbulbs a product or a service.
My solution would be to require refunds for hardware if the underlying software materially changes in terms of features, excepting safety features (I'm fine with disabling features because of an unknown risk of fire or something).
To me, the underlying issue is information asymmetry. The vendor knows when they're going to make changes, and users don't. The vendor knows which features get used and which don't, impacting the features they change, but users would have to guess whether they're a major usecase or not. The vendor likely has a list of lines in the sand they won't cross, but users don't know where those are.
Those used to be irrelevant because it wasn't possible to live-update the features of hardware, but it has become relevant. The free market is lacking information to make informed purchasing decisions.
Now I realise that a lot of those points are not as clear cut and products would probably cost a bunch more but somehow I would prefer that. What do you guys think?
I have an old house, where it location of a few switches are just completely illogical. One solution would be to install a few "smart" switches and a relay or two. If I want to stay secure and care the least bit about cost and privacy, there's no choice other than run an open source gateway solution, funnily enough it's also the only solution that will work with almost everything.
There's an entire cottage industry and hobby scene around making 3D print and modifications to Ikea, Hue and other switches so that they'll look like "the real thing".
https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switches/zbmini-l2/
Yes, I saw Danish appliances, they look nice.
I have multiple lights, power plugs and sensors operating on z-wave being controlled by Home Assistant. None of these require me to log into a third party app or service.
Now after one announcement it's something I want to get rid of fast and am ashamed of recommending it to my friends. I already block my Hue Bridge from accessing the internet, so that should keep it from updating so that the functionality stays the same.
Does anyone have any good app recommendations for Android? I use HA, but last time I checked you weren't able to configure the actual Hue scenes in it (and using HA scenes triggered Hue's spam limits).
I'll still probably recommend hue light bulbs with the caveat that I don't recommend their bridge/app, compared to the other bulbs I've used they are much more reliable and handle color changes much more smoothly & consistently.
I've had this behavior on a physical dimmer switch and an ordinary cheap LED. It couldn't be turned off. Somehow the dimmer always feeds it some power, which the LED responds to. If that low power is at the edge of its "activation power", you're effectively rapidly turning it on and off.
This kills any LED. LEDs die from actuations far before they die from hours in use. Hue bulbs are praised for their reliability, so something is off.
In my case, I changed the physical dimmer into an ordinary light switch. That fixed it.
I have a bunch of these switches https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/TS0044.html#tuya-ts0044, and the solution of turning off the periodic battery reporting seems to have helped, I haven't had to change any of their batteries in many months. See https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/14157#issuecomm.... Not sure if something similar can be done with original Hue switches or bridge (or whether it would help there).
One different kind of switch I have, which doesn't have this problem, has had the same battery in it since I bought it 2 years ago.
You can keep your Hue bulbs and devices but threw away the app, hub, and need to work with hue as an institution at all.
I got a $30 USB zigbee stick to replace the hub. works great!
This line is uttered in a cloakroom scene. In the scene, the protagonist Ryszard Ochódzki goes to a cloakroom to retrieve his coat. He hands over his ticket to the attendants. They search but claim they can't find his coat. Ochódzki becomes agitated but the attendants are nonchalant.
The scene satirizes inefficiency and lack of accountability in bureaucratic systems.
Hue's "take it or leave it" answers ("Believe us, this change can only benefit the users, when it comes to security.") about their recent changes feel kinda the same. The message seems to be, "We're changing this and what are you going to do about it?"
It's scary how a movie about life in communist Poland can still feel relevant when dealing with companies today.
Perhaps centralization is the problem? I can't help but think all those people in crypto that said "we buy into the protocol, not the coin!" were onto something after all.
- official Hue apps - who cares
- hue bridge - bad, would break apps like HuePro and would force more complicated setup for some
- bulb - unlikely, that would mean everyone buying this for IoT lighting can throw out their whole set
Not throw out, just don’t upgrade the firmware again and not buy new ones that might have the broken firmware.
I might not buy another base station again, though, if this gets enforced at that level.
Enforcing it at the bridge level would break so many setups, apps, custom integrations that even if they try this, they'll dial it back from the avalanche of outrage.