▲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.
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.
reply▲All except their new wifi connected ones... called Wiz.. watch out for those, much more affordable but really crappy app/setup situation.
reply▲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.
[0]: https://github.com/jesserockz/wizmote-esphome
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.
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wiz/
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!
reply▲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.
That is good to know! Thank you very much. I will look in that direction then.
reply▲can you still set up direct connection between a switch and a light which would work even if the hub is down?
reply▲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.
reply▲SparkyMcUnicorn2 months ago
[-] All zigbee devices require a coordinator. It can be a raspberry pi or any other hardware/software with the radio, but it does have to be powered up.
reply▲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.
SparkyMcUnicorn2 months ago
[-] I'd modify my comment if I could. Bound some remotes to some hue bulbs, proving myself wrong.
reply▲Tijdreiziger2 months ago
[-] Not all, IKEA Trådfri works fully hub-less by default.
reply▲SparkyMcUnicorn2 months ago
[-] TIL I can bind my remotes to my Hue bulbs, and they work without the coordinator.
reply▲So how do the Hue light switches work?
reply▲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.
reply▲noamchomsky12 months ago
[-] you still need a hub for zigbee connectivity right?
reply▲ender3413412 months ago
[-] 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).
reply▲Nullabillity2 months ago
[-] You need a ZigBee hub, but it doesn't have to be a Hue one.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲Sue in small claims court?
reply▲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?
reply▲I'm going to RMA my lightbulb if it stops working because I haven't logged in.
reply▲Most (almost all?) Philips Hue devices are standard Zigbee devices. Chuck out your Philips gateway and replace it with a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant and a Zigbee stick. Yeah, it's a bit more work, but if you're reading Hacker News you probably already know how to do this anyways, and honestly, Home Assistant is pretty damn good at staying hands-off. (I only update it every few months, it's on a battery backup in my house so it's basically always on, sometimes I forget it's even there.)
reply▲Just using zigbee2mqtt is also an option, as a more lightweight alternative to Home Assistant (for zigbee devices only).
It may require a bit more tinkering though, you either need to use it via its web dashboard, or write a simple program in anything that has a mqtt client library (which is basically everything), if you want to link it with things like zigbee remotes or some external triggers, etc.
> standard Zigbee devices
One of the issues with these "standard" Zigbee devices is that you can't configure all of their settings.
I have a bunch of Aqara motion sensors and I can't set their timeouts or sensitivity unless I use the Aqara app and hub. Used as a normal Zigbee device they offer no configuration options.
That’s right. I have a significant investment in Hue devices since they are (or were, prior to sale of company) simply the best LED lamps available.
The Hue app surfaces functionality that isn’t available on plain zigbee, such as soft on/off and motion sensor programs. It is possible to mimic this to an extent but the native implementation is superior.
I also have a lot of different lamps that are either plain Zigbee or IKEA, and no matter the approach - node-red, home assistant, homekit - the “integrated” experience sucks compared to the Hue.
acidburnNSA2 months ago
[-] I ordered a Zigbee usb stick right after reading the blog. It came in the mail yesterday. It took me 2 hours to install and configure zigbee2mqtt (I already had mosquitto mqtt server and home assistant installed). As I deleted my HUE and innr bulbs out the HUE app, they started showing up in the zigbee2mqtt panel, and awesomely also right in Home Assistant. I renamed the entities to what they had been before and am fully online without the hue bridge or the huge app. I deleted the hue app right after this and threw the hue bridge in the trash.
reply▲This is what I did from the start, was never going to deal with Wifi bulbs or proprietary hubs, just a zigbee transceiver plugged into my server with homeassistant, mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt and I get all the functionality I could want, I basically always use my watch to control my lights now.
reply▲BenFranklin1002 months ago
[-] This is beyond awful. So now this company (which will eventually get hacked) is going to share information with third parties about when people turn their lights on and off.
Get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and switch on the light called ‘bathroom’? Hue knows.
A detailed record of when you leave for work and arrive home? Hue has it.
Go on vacation for two weeks? Hue will be able to infer that too.
This is beyond a privacy nightmare. It’s a privacy horror shitshow by a corporation that tricked millions of people to invest in pricey hardware and is now forcing these same users to give up intimate details of their lives to which it can sell to the highest bidder.
Don’t bother writing a letter to Signify. Call your congress person. This is a class action lawsuit. Sue these fuckers back into the Stone Age.
WaitWaitWha2 months ago
[-] Mitigation: If using Zigbee bulbs,
1. get rid of the Philips app (not the bulbs).
2. Replace the Philips Hue bridge (hub) with a RasPi or NUC computer.
3. Connect a Zigbee/Z-Wave combo USB radio dongle.
4. Load Home Assistant OS.
This solution not only replaces the Philips locked system, but it can replace (or take over) Amazon, Google, Apple, Ikea and more, simultaneously. About 2551 more.
Home Assistant is not perfect, but it provides just the privacy (and features) these vendors are taking away or never gave me.
I have Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Wifi devices on Home Assistant (RasPi 4 8GB peaks around 4% utilization). I rarely care about who makes the device nowadays. Is it Zigbee or Z-Wave and cheap? Great, I buy it, and it works.
As of this instance, it manages over 100 "devices", from a magnetic door sensor to the Synology NAS drive temperature.
( list of official integrations [because there are many more through community integrations]: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#all )
This is 100% the correct answer. If you ever see a home automation or related device that you find interesting your immediate next step should be to enter "Home Assistant <device>" in to your favorite search engine and see what's up.
If the device can not be connected to Home Assistant, or if doing so requires connecting Home Assistant to the vendor's cloud rather than directly connecting to the local device, you should look elsewhere.
Sometimes, especially if the device is based on one of the common ESP chips, there may be options for alternative firmware which solves this problem but whether the alternative firmware supports the features you want or can be easily installed with the hardware and skills you possess will vary situationally.
---
I'm not an Apple user for the most part, but AFAIK HomeKit requires that a device be locally controllable so that's a good starting point when looking at a lot of competing products. If it supports HomeKit there's a decent chance HA will be able to interface with it directly.
> 3. Connect a Zigbee/Z-Wave combo USB radio dongle.
Can you recommend a dongle?
WaitWaitWha2 months ago
[-] Yes.
I have a Nortek HUSBZB-1 model; got at the end of 2021. Never had to do anything to it. About 44USD now.
I chose it through reading community posts and such. One specific recommendation I took to heart was to put it on a USB port extending cable, so it is away from the electronics.
Conbee 2 works great, much better range than what the other dongles have. The software bundled with it is also decent and quick to get started with. It got REST API too for external integration.
Of course you're free to use any software with it.
I use a SoundOff USB dongle, works great with HA. I recommend against WiFi Zigbee coordinators, they suck.
reply▲guitarlimeo2 months ago
[-] 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).
acidburnNSA2 months ago
[-] I can recommend this:
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/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!
ender3413412 months ago
[-] 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.
bigstrat20032 months ago
[-] 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. :(
reply▲iteratethis2 months ago
[-] 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.
bigstrat20032 months ago
[-] 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
reply▲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.
reply▲Caseta stuff isn't perfect for every use case, but I have had absolutely 0 problems with mine.
reply▲hellotheretoday2 months ago
[-] Seconded, my caseta stuff is the most reliable of all the smart home stuff I’ve used. It consistently just works 100% of the time after years
reply▲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.
reply▲There are plenty of smart home devices that supports reasonably open protocols. This includes Hue devices (Zigbee)
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.
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.
reply▲Hue devices require no flashing
reply▲karaterobot2 months ago
[-] I'm surprised they didn't already require this, but I think it's probably safe to say it was a likely and foreseeable outcome in any case. That, combined with a dearth of use cases that made sense (for my life) is what's kept me from using these products.
About the only reason I could think of to buy smart lightbulbs would be to suddenly turn all the lights in the house red, and yell "torpedoes in the water, brace for impact!" and that doesn't seem like a strong enough argument. I'd probably only do this 2-3 times a month anyway.
tetromino_2 months ago
[-] Smart lights are incredibly useful with infants/pre-verbal toddlers in the house. E.g. a quick "hey Google, set kids room lights to 20%" whilst trying to convince an energetic 2 year old to get ready for bedtime.
They become rapidly less useful when the toddler learns to say "hey Google" and decides to make all lights green all the time.
How is this easier than just having a dimmer switch inside the bedroom door?
That's what I've done in our house. Lots of dimmers. Some are "rocker switches with a slide along the side," other are more digital "push button to turn lights on to the last setting, small rocker to adjust light level, you can always come up from 0 by using the rocker" types.
Having moved twice with a toddler, and gone without voice activated lights in the nursery for a couple of days, it's
huge. Usually I am carrying them up the stairs, with both hands; they're squirming, set them directly on the diaper changing table, and then plop them (again, both hands) into the crib. There is almost never a time when I am not holding thing(s) with both hands in that room.
Or in another case, most of the lights are low in the living/play room, and I forgot to turn down the nursery lights, they're already winding down, walking up the dark stairs and into a dim nursery helps keep them chill. Walking into a blinding daylight blue room and then turning down the lights is liable to add an extra 20 minutes to our bedtime routine.
I will never not have voice activated lights so long as I can afford them.
And I don't believe in "sharing my home activity data with third parties," so I won't have voice activated anything.
I'll just note that most of what you complain about with dimmers isn't a problem with the correct dimmer - I don't have any dimmers that require coming to full brightness before dimming them down, no matter where they were last set.
tetromino_2 months ago
[-] A dimmer switch has some inconveniences:
* it requires you to physically go to the switch (inconvenient whilst holding a squirming child);
* it controls only one hard-wired fixture - there is no master physical dimmer for all light sources (overhead, standlights, bedside lamps or whatever else) in a room;
* it's harder to install a switch than to screw in some smart bulbs
Gosh no one ever raised a toddler before 2014.
reply▲acidburnNSA2 months ago
[-] Use cases that I personally like:
* Turn existing lights into timed night lights that turn on at a configurable brightness when I pass certain motions sensors and then turn off after a timeout (cool/useful when I'm wandering around house at night)
* Similar: Turn existing light fixtures into motion activated on switches (useful for dark staircase)
* Turn lights on in morning and evening when I'm traveling to make it look like the place is occupied if I'm traveling
* Party mode: cool colors shifting in cool ways in the rare event there's a party
* Gradually go from bright white light to softer light as the day goes on in the office, and then stay soft at night to help with sleep
* Turn on in a sequence when people are detected close by outside in the middle of the night to try to scare them off
* Turn a certain color to indicate something being off, like a server offline, water detected, etc.
Oh wow, that is unbelievably close to one of my HomeKit scenes I have setup. If I ask Siri to “rig for silent running”, all my RGB bulbs go to all Red, all my other ones turn off, and my HomePods play a clip of the robot voice of the submarine from the game “Subnautica” saying “rigged for silent running”. All done via a Shortcut.
reply▲These products are mostly targeted at the the Youtuber/streamer market that need to add variety to their backdrops.
reply▲Not even close.
There do exist products made for for a variety of Youtube/video/streaming needs, including lighting, and they are niche.
You might think "but there are many many Youtubers/streamers" but in comparison with the overall market for such lamps, they're insignificant in number.
Hue and co (from Amazon, IKEA, etc) are mass market products.
Literally every person I know has these, even my family in west Texas with the deer head hung on the wall.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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?
Both people who care about these would make a great customer base /s
reply▲For iOS/Apple users just use the bulbs through the Home app. I don’t think I’ve used the Hue app in at least a couple of years since configuring that. Fuck Phillips. Won’t be buying any more of their products.
reply▲EduardoBautista2 months ago
[-] I don’t think you can have dynamic lighting that slowly changes the color of the lights with just the Home app.
reply▲AdamGibbins2 months ago
[-] You can, Homekit call it "Adaptive Lighting". It's not as flexible though, you just turn it on and Apple does what it wants - there's no variables you can fiddle with if you don't like what its doing.
reply▲EduardoBautista2 months ago
[-] I believe "Adaptive Lighting" is the light changing throughout the day. Dynamic lighting from Hue changes color slowly over seconds.
reply▲Do we know for a fact that it'll keep working after the change? Are there any homekit devices that require you to log in to a separate app? If so, then the change doesn't affect me very much.
reply▲And next you'll have a subscription to indoor lighting.
What can be turned into a subscription next! I can't wait to find out.
Maybe I'll become a survivalist who builds his own lightbulbs, computers, etc.
Once I figure the off-grid lifestyle out, maybe I can launch a paid newsletter about it...
andyjohnson02 months ago
[-] You have already turned your lights on 80 times in the last 30 day period. To continue turning on your lights, please visit our website to upgrade to one of our premium packages with enhanced light-cycle options. In the meantime, your home lighting will stay in enhanced darkness mode for your comfourt and convenience. Thank you, and have a nice day.
reply▲Your health and safety is our number one priority.
reply▲You have a subscription for the indoor lighting through the electricity bill already. It’s more pay-as-you go though.
reply▲friend_and_foe2 months ago
[-] Imagine having to create an account to use a lightbulb. It's all gone too far.
reply▲trey-jones2 months ago
[-] Yes. When you take a step back and consider this exact statement, it's utter insanity.
reply▲sunnybeetroot2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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".
Just get some of the many RF controlled switches available on amazon. Many of them you don't even need to do any wiring to use them.
reply▲FirmwareBurner2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲helsinkiandrew2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲Philips lighting is no longer Philips at all. They spun that off to Signify, who holds the brand name for Philips lighting.
reply▲I don't think that's true. Signify designs in the Netherlands and they have their own production facilities in various countries.
reply▲Time and time again It takes just one MBA trying to boost numbers to turn a good product into a data collection nightmare.
Honestly is there any IoT brand that we can trust long-term? Maybe IKEA stuff?
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).
cassianoleal2 months ago
[-] 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.
IKEA so far seems like a decent bet as well.
[0] https://shellystore.co.uk/
[1] https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
ender3413412 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲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.
reply▲ChainOfFools2 months ago
[-] 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.
Thanks. Looking at their site again now, I have no idea what made me assume z-wave, and no recollection of what I was thinking.
reply▲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.
reply▲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?
I really don't understand consumers who, despite companies clearly demonstrating this, will just buy the next IoT thing anyway.
Why don't companies offer better, longer-lasting products that can be community-driven after EOL? Because money.
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)
Unfortunately the IKEA bulbs and switches are of much lower quality than Philips. From my experience, they don't dim quite as smoothly. :(
reply▲LeafItAlone2 months ago
[-] 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).
reply▲gumballindie2 months ago
[-] 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?
reply▲Trust stuff running on generic embedded open-sourced hardware running on open-sourced software.
Raspberry, Arduino and others: Release some awesome open-sourced hardware standard for the smart home: lighting, measuring, interfacing!
Or does something already exist?
companies are profit first, not trust first
reply▲Yes, we need more regulation. Or a better system to begin with.
reply▲friend_and_foe2 months ago
[-] Do you think its a coincidence this came right after the ban on incandescent bulbs? Regulation got us here. It won't help when government is captured.
reply▲Yes. This is idiotic theory, Regulation is only about power efficiency
reply▲> Do you think its a coincidence this came right after the ban on incandescent bulbs?
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.
solarkraft2 months ago
[-] 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.
> 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.
solarkraft2 months ago
[-] The people who actually act responsibly tend to be ousted and replaced by those who instead primarily look after profits. See my other comment.
reply▲It is absolutely their fault and not that of the public at large.
Companies are not sentient “profit-maximizing machines, they’re a collection of people. And it’s people making the decisions.
solarkraft2 months ago
[-] 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.
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.
mirekrusin2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲> 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.
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.
Plus Sonos really hasn't kept up. No support for RSTP, no ability to cast audio.
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 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.
mirekrusin2 months ago
[-] Man, it's a speaker.
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.
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.
mirekrusin2 months ago
[-] 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
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.
reply▲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
reply▲solarkraft2 months ago
[-] 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.
Fun fact: eQ-3 is a subsidiary of the DIY electronics store ELV: https://www.eq-3.com/about-eq-3.html
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?!
reply▲lotsofpulp2 months ago
[-] reply▲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.
reply▲lotsofpulp2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲lotsofpulp2 months ago
[-] I think a wired Apple TV and lots of wifi coverage for the cameras help a lot. Wireless home hub does not perform the same.
reply▲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!
reply▲> 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.
reply▲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...
This is extremely annoying. I invested in the Hue ecosystem
specifically because it was one of the few that did not require an account and allowed me to keep all of my devices offline and isolated on a local network with no internet traffic.
I will not be purchasing any more of their products and will do my best to extract a refund for the hundreds of dollars I've spent on them so far.
poisonborz2 months ago
[-] The big question is at which level this auth is enforced:
- 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
> - 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.
iteratethis2 months ago
[-] My guess would be in the app.
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.
This will lose them their HomeKit certification.
reply▲luxdeillyrii2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲#internetofshit
reply▲baal80spam2 months ago
[-] Oh come on - don't you want for all your bulbs to be turned on already _before_ you get back home? It's a gamechanger!
reply▲What
is a game changer is to be able to just turn off everything in the house when I leave, and know the iron
will be off, along with all the lights.
It's not critically important, but the many individually small conveniences add up.
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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲I thought about putting in motion detectors for my lights.
Then I remembered I have cats.
Convenience will destroy the world.
reply▲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?)
dustypotato2 months ago
[-] Turn off the main switch ?
reply▲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.
BizarreByte2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲theshrike792 months ago
[-] Being able to remotely make sure the coffee machine isn't powered is the true game changer.
Having the lights turn off automatically when there's nobody home is also nice though.
mrguyorama2 months ago
[-] Coffeemakers usually turn themselves off? My $12 one does.
reply▲theshrike792 months ago
[-] 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 =)
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
I'd just like mine to turn to a brown hue when any of the bathrooms in my household are occupied.
reply▲Internet of Trash would be a better name (same IoT abbrev.)
reply▲How about the Internet of Turds? It keeps both the initials and the flavour.
reply▲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.
reply▲littlestymaar2 months ago
[-] You probably don't need to be able to control them over the internet though…
reply▲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.
reply▲When I bought my no-brand coloured smartlight a few years ago I explicitly passed up on Philips Hue because it now seemed to require some smartphone app, and I just wanted to use a remote control. It's simpler to use, faster to use, has a lot less moving parts, and generally "always works". While there are some use cases where an app might be a bit more convenient, I'm willing to bet that if you asked people on the street that the majority would prefer to use just a remote (I admit I have no data to back this up).
Security and privacy concerns don't even come in to play (although these do make the apps even worse)
This is a shame, because I had good experiences with my old Hue, when they still did remotes.
They still do switches, what remotes are you referring to?
reply▲reply▲Yeah, but with the ability to change the colour as well, and stuff like that. i.e. basically do everything you can, except without an app.
Something like this: https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1bweoSVXXXXbHXFXXq6xXFXXXG/New...
Maybe I missed it, but from the material that was available to me without actually buying one of these things, this seemed impossible: the boxes and stores didn't have any remotes, and I couldn't find anything on the website. If it is possible, then it's hidden pretty well and people are steered towards that app pretty strongly.
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.
pizzaknife2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲brezelgoring2 months ago
[-] 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.
HP was forcing me to have an account to scan on my printer using their mobile app.
I voted with my money and when I needed a printer for my dad I got a Brother.
It is even worse now. Not only do you need an account, but it won't scan if your ink is empty.
reply▲> 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
justinclift2 months ago
[-] Brother is unfortunately playing games with DRM and similar now too. :(
reply▲littlestymaar2 months ago
[-] Bad service drives out good…
reply▲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.
reply▲Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of having to sign up for a service or account just to use the product that you paid for?
reply▲This is a well established trend. I dropped razer when they tried to get me to login to something to use my fucking mouse.
reply▲iteratethis2 months ago
[-] But why? Are you not interested in our weekly 4GB driver update? Even more ways to blink the lights now.
reply▲well, that sucks a lot.
Phillips had made an excellent product - reasonably priced, reliable as lights and network-wise, compatible with Homekit, with their random app, with Home Assistant, and now apparently they want to make it worse.
waffletower2 months ago
[-] About 10 days ago I was climbing upstairs late headed to bed. I stared at the Hue app on my phone confused. Was Hue really asking me to agree to a new terms of service (ToS) before it would allow me to turn off lights in my own home? Lights that I had purchased outright without Phillips financing more than 8 years ago? Indeed it was. What value as a customer do I get from these hilariously timed, intrusive ToS updates? Better question: what value does the company issuing them gain by alienating existing customers?
reply▲gumballindie2 months ago
[-] It’s not about the value you get, it’s about the value they get. How is this even legal is beyond me.
reply▲waffletower2 months ago
[-] They are losing my value, as I will definitely be more open to competitors and less open to expanding my commitment to their products. A light switch should be dependable and simply work, there should never be a dialogue unless I request one. Imagine toilets with a ToS.
reply▲> How is this even legal is beyond me.
It's the same argument as people who say Google should be allowed to censor whoever they want. "They're a private company, they can do whatever they want. Nobody is forcing you to use their services."
Clearly, in many areas of life, politics and the legal system needs to be realigned with the modern technological landscape. But so far, it seems most such efforts are pushing things in the exact wrong direction.
regularjack2 months ago
[-] It's not comparable because you paid for bulbs, swithches, bridges etc. You don't pay for Google, at least not in the example you gave.
reply▲It's the same argument. Nobody forced you to pay for the bulbs, switches, bridges etc.
For the record, I don't agree with it -- just saying.
> Philips Hue will soon force users to create a Hue account and sign in to continue to use the app and control the smart lights. The best security model to protect smart devices is to keep them disconnected from the internet, or at least keep this option available.
Does this just apply to the phone app, or to the base station as well?
IIRC, the base station has a REST API and there are 3rd party apps that can control it (but I haven't touched my Hue light setup in about 5 years, and don't really use any of the smart features anymore).
falsenapkin2 months ago
[-] That API is junk and I think requires auth now or something. I was messing with it some months ago and was surprised after a month the system changed.
reply▲https://developers.meethue.com/develop/get-started-2/ explains how to get the key to use the API. You just need to press the button on the bridge. Sth. broke for me so I wrote a loop and pressed the button frantically until one of the API calls worked:
for i in `seq 1 10`; do http -v 192.168.xxx.xxx/api devicetype="my_hue_app#script"; sleep 1; done
reply▲standardUser2 months ago
[-] I have a lot of Hue lights, but I hate the app and hate it even more with this change. Are there alternative apps that work well with the proprietary hardware?
reply▲You can connect Hue lights to a generic Zigbee connector and control them with Home Assistant.
reply▲bittercynic2 months ago
[-] I keep my "Hue Bridge" on a network that can't reach the internet, and it can still control the lights.
reply▲imoverclocked2 months ago
[-] They can be used via Apple HomeKit but I’m not sure about pairing in the first place without the app.
reply▲You can get a zigbee dongle and control them with home assistant!
reply▲manicennui2 months ago
[-] Walking over to the light switch and turning the lights on and off.
reply▲Random, but for HomeKit users, I really like a few recent Belkin products: specifically the most recent models of smart plug and smart light switch with Thread radios. Not only do they not require an account, but they don't even have an app. (And can't be used with the existing Belkin Wemo app.) They get firmware updates directly through the Apple Home app.
reply▲skunkworker2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲ssddanbrown2 months ago
[-] 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.
reply▲what's HA?
reply▲skunkworker2 months ago
[-] Home Assistant
https://www.home-assistant.io/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.
The cloud is always someone else's computer.
The cloud, and the internet always costs someone, somewhere, money that they ultimately wont' want to keep paying for free.
Since this means you will have to pay, it doesn't hurt to look at self hosting if you make it as far as using smart home tech that has a temporarily free cloud.
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.
reply▲surfingdino2 months ago
[-] Philips used to make products I wanted to own. I now make sure I don't allow them them in my life. (Not just Philips, btw.) I wonder why large corporations/brands do not care anymore? Have they become too big to remove them from our lives and do not need to listen to us?
reply▲Philips owns the brand but the product was spun off to a third party company several years ago, who licenses it.
reply▲Fauntleroy2 months ago
[-] People who do not care about this kind of thing are far more profitable to them than we are.
reply▲Philips sold all the bits that made them great. It's a zombie.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲I was late to Hue.. I have 4 bulbs in my house I bought within the last year.
I never even knew about their app, I've been using Wiz instead. My Phillips lights came with instructions to use Wiz and I didn't even know there was an official Hue app until I saw this today.
But I have a Wiz account..
helsinkiandrew2 months ago
[-] 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?
I use Home Assistant. It's open source and there is a huge community around it.
reply▲You still need the Hue hub for that though right?
reply▲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 :-)
Thanks, I run HomeBridge on a Pi so I might try this if Hue go through with their plan.
reply▲blitz_skull2 months ago
[-] This is sad, but good to know! I will certainly be avoiding Phillips products in the future. There’s no reason to need an account to control a light bulb’s settings. Absolutely ridiculous.
reply▲Fortunately I can relink my lights to a zigbee adapter and remove the hub entirely, but it's significant pointless effort I'd rather not have to do. Thanks Philips or whatever third party subsidiary now makes Hue! I'll now never trust or buy anything from you ever again.
If anyone has a setup like mine (a Hue Hub, but also using HomeAssistant) I would suggest firewalling off the Hue Hub from accessing the internet. While the Hue App will stop working your lights shouldn't... for now.
oxfordmale2 months ago
[-] SeeYouLaterAlligator12345678@gmail.com coming up.
The more companies force this the less valuable data they get out of it. Sure you can email me, I am just opening the account once a month to keep it active.
stronglikedan2 months ago
[-] Soon they'll require monthly 2FA to use their products. Ya know, for your protection!
reply▲dieselgate2 months ago
[-] opening an account once/month is still quite a lot really. without payment automation i can barely keep up with bills
reply▲imoverclocked2 months ago
[-] I’m really
really tired of privacy erosion in software and services. Matter seems cool because you can choose a privacy aware home controller but then all the extra bits offered by individual vendors still come into play.
Does anyone run multiple networks with all of their smart devices disconnected from the internet via firewall/air gap/etc? Does anything function close to what an average consumer should expect in that scenario?
All of my smart home stuff is Zigbee or z-wave. My "hub" for both is a pi4 running Home Assistant with usb dongles. I couldn't be happier with my setup. No accounts, no phoning home, just my devices and my data.
Plus all devices interoperate with each other seamlessly. 10/10 would recommend
peterbraden2 months ago
[-] Does anyone have a recommendation for a replacement bridge that works with home assistant? It seems I’ll be throwing out the hue bridge and never buying a phillips product again.
reply▲3695486848928262 months ago
[-] Hue isn't really a Phillips product. Signify is the company you want to avoid.
reply▲That might be strictly true but the blowback from this is me avoiding Philips products from now on.
They should use their influence with Signify to get them to take a long term view. Right now I regret buying more expensive "Philips" light bulbs, sync boxes and other hardware.
I'm pissed off that I bought one product and they've retrospectively changed the terms of usage.
I guess you can still "opt out" by getting rid of hue bridge, by replacing it with home assistant + zigbee2mqtt
1) set up homeassistant on rpi
2) get zigbee2mqtt adapter (hue bridge can be used to push sneaky updates to fuck up their bulbs further)
3) backup your rpi
4) bulbs --> zigbee2mqtt --> homeassistant
Happened to me with some Kasa Smart devices I had owned for years. One day to be able to use the app I needed to create an account.
A couple of months later the same thing happend with a Mi Band smart watch. The app required to create an account.
Personally I won't be buying any smart devices ever again.
I noticed this on my Sonicare Toothbrush already. I expected there would be Home Assistant integrations or Gadgetbridge-like alternatives but no: Creating an account is a must. Instantly returned it for a "non-smart" model
reply▲manicennui2 months ago
[-] At this point I'm really curious to see what more consumers are willing to give up for minor convenience. It would be somewhat humorous if some product categories hadn't been completely destroyed by this bullshit.
reply▲contravariant2 months ago
[-] Is there
any official announcement of this? I'd like to know some more details on what they plan to do with the existing API.
All I can find is references to something posted on twitter, which I refuse to accept as official communication.
If you install the mobile Hue app, it’s right on the main screen.
reply▲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?)
reply▲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.
reply▲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
reply▲The message they have added to the app clearly says that the situation has changed.
reply▲I was literally just moving my Hue bulbs off of the Hue bridge and onto Zigbee via Home Assistant. It was really simple and the Zigbee USB dongle was like $30. Lights work great and the Hue bridge is now unplugged.
reply▲Smart bulbs are a PITA anyways. If you just need on/off/dim (most people) a Lutron Caseta based system is way more reliable and you don't need to worry about unintuitive light switches.
reply▲Are there any hardware vendors that produce lights meant for operation with open source? How would one go about transitioning to offline-only wireless home automation?
reply▲Hey Hue....fuck you. I don't need smart bulbs...another fucking Cricut...hey execs ...jump out of the window leave the golden parashute behind...
reply▲black mirror episode: evilcorp turns off the lights until you install their app, but you can't find your phone in the dark
reply▲throwaway2902 months ago
[-] And 2 years later, if some words in your account username or description age badly, your house will go dark forever.
reply▲gumballindie2 months ago
[-] Why is my lightbulb in need of an online account? That thing goes in the bin.
reply▲Oh weird. I was soon planning 5o throw out my 300 bucks worth of hue hardware
reply▲horns4lyfe2 months ago
[-] Cool, I’m done with them. Was a good product, no more.
reply▲how long until a subscription fee is mandatory?
reply▲This will be interesting in Europe. As far as I can tell there is no explicit consent requested for "sharing with partners". It's hidden in their policy, which is not free and informed consent under GDPR.
If a consumer objects to sharing their data with partners, Signify won't be allowed to do so. And they can't claim it's a required part of the service since the app has worked for years without any data uploading at all, let alone giving it to their partners.
reply▲pizzaknife2 months ago
[-] UBIK. read it.
reply▲What's the link between a story about psychic power and the nature of reality and the need to create an account to control light bulbs?
reply▲pizzaknife2 months ago
[-] company trade secrets/pay per use. Book had an ancillary gripe about "nickle and diming" (americanism, think "death by 1000 financial papercuts). A subtext to the entire engagement is that everything is implicitly rented. Here's a non-spoiler quote which (if i recall the book correctly) occurs within the first chapter:
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "
^ That door, was "the main character's front door"
IoT.
edit: grammar
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.
– Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to...
You should also cite when "Ubik" was published as it's fascinating: 1969!
reply▲The older I get the more I de-value "smart" things. I love dumb things. Lightbulb must be dumb. Incandescent lightbulbs were a direct evolution of candles and gas lamps leveraging on simple physical laws and principles. They were not very effective turning most of the energy into heat and LED light bulbs must have been great. But they bring electronics and multiply complexity. I already cannot just simply get a lightbulb. Because I need to take into account several different variables and characteristics of it (temperature, luminous flux, dimmability, trust into lamp lifetime claims and absence of flicker, etc.) And then some clowns bring even more electronics with all this wireless remote-controllable color changing lights. It is like wtf? Give me a simple lamp that will be dirt cheap to replace or will serve me a lifetime without me thinking about its guts.
Vote with your wallet. Don't support over-engineering.
P.S. Some of the best LED lightbulbs I have were installed in 2012 and they are still working with very small degradation of brightness. Nowadays whenever I need to buy a LED bulb it is like a lottery. Smart IoT light bulbs? Just plain no. As with the rest of the gimmicks.
I tend to agree but there are use cases where the smart bulbs have been great for us.
1. Next to our bed we have reading lamp sconces. The sconces we picked out do not have light switches (oops). It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as now the reading lamps automatically switch on in the evening before we come upstairs to bed, then turn off as part of the “good night” scene (which also alarms the security system, etc). If the alarm goes off, the lights automatically switch on to max.
2. Our front porch and rear lights automatically turn on and off with the sunset/sunrise. They also turn onto a flashing red/blue if the alarm is triggered (kind of corny but hey anything to scare off would be intruders)
3. Our kids have smart bulbs in their room lamps. We are able to switch them to a low red colored light as a night light automatically when it’s their bedtime.
Most of my lights are “dumb”. The few use cases for smart bulbs are nice though. I use the Nanoleaf essentials through Apple HomeKit so I don’t feel like I’m exposing my personal details to some third party.
Yea, that's mostly where I am on this too.
Primary lighting is dumb and controlled by switches.
Secondary lighting/mood lighting is smart and has the ability to be color changed and timing controlled.
That said, 'smart' systems love to lose connection or their settings and do the wrong thing too frequently.
I’ve found HomeKit to be pretty resilient. During internet outages it still functions locally, which was an important design choice for me.
There was one time where it went on the fritz and ultimately fixed itself when I restarted my phone (wish there was more troubleshooting or audit logging, but that’s endemic to all Apple products not just HomeKit)
My primary lighting in the main areas of the house is zwave. The switches work like regular switches and require local access only. It's smart if I want it to be.
reply▲TRiG_Ireland2 months ago
[-] How or why is it helpful for the lights to switch on in an empty room just so you don't have half a second of darkness when you walk in there twenty minutes later?
reply▲You sound irrationally angry but I’ll bite anyway.
1. At night we are turning all of the other lights off. Our bedroom door is open, so the light dimly illuminates the way to our room without having to turn on hallway lights.
2. When we aren’t home it still happens giving an impression someone is home.
3. It looks nice when you walk in.
4. The convenience is worth the $0.00036 in electric cost per day. (Approx 6w * 0.12/kwh * 30 minutes). That works out to be 13 cents per year. The benefit of 1, 2 and 3 above divided by 13 cents per year gives quite the positive ROI.
TRiG_Ireland2 months ago
[-] I often come across (in writing, at least) as far more irritable than I actually am. It's something I'm working on.
reply▲If I want some sort of remote control or automation, I use products that rely on an IR remote. This way a Raspberry Pi with an IR LED can do anything I want without depending on vendor software.
reply▲We need a no-tether law.
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.
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.
yjftsjthsd-h2 months ago
[-] Sure, but the bridge is an important part of the system.
reply▲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.
everforward2 months ago
[-] > Otherwise it's a service and not a product.
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.
And ability to freely flash our own firmware (without taking the thing apart) so they don't land in landfill
reply▲thaumasiotes2 months ago
[-] Aren't services exempt from sales tax? Passing that law might be a challenge.
reply▲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.
reply▲"What's the worst that could happen, if we let MBA-types take over engineering?"
"Even your home's light bulbs will require an Internet-connected computer account that spies on you."
I don't recall any of this short-sighted, anti-consumer nonsense when I earned my MBA. I do remember a focus on ethics and doing right by the consumer. There was a lot of corporate social responsibility stuff that I thought was going to be a drag and then it ended up being pretty informative. I suspect MBA-types often get a bad rap because pretty much everyone has had a shitty boss before and that person may have had an MBA. Maybe my program was an outlier, but there was nothing inherent to the curriculum that would encourage this kind of behavior. In other words, I don't think it's the MBA that makes them bad. They were already bad and then went and got an education.
reply▲While I agree, and my own business education was very much like this, it is management that is closest to shareholder primacy and the public-market monster that is mandatory, unlimited growth. It is these perverse incentives that fuel rent-seeking fuckery
Primacy needs to be destroyed and the company's obligations divided evenly among all stakeholders: shareholders, employees, and customers
EricMausler2 months ago
[-] If A then B does not imply If B then A
But, "If A then B" & "B" together do create a signal for A. The strength of that signal is dependent on the statistics involved.
In this context, A is a bad boss and B is getting an MBA.
Relevant statistics would be the distribution of degrees among bad bosses, the frequency of good boss vs bad boss, the proportion of degree holders that are bad bosses, etc
There is a valid signal, the question is how strong it actually is and how much it is overplayed.
This is an incredibly widespread issue when generalized beyond MBAs and bad bosses. I think people fall into roughly 4 stages with it:
1) people do not know its a logical fallacy to begin with, and treat the signal as a full on implication
2) people learn of the fallacy and think the technicality of it as a fallacy means the signal cannot exist at all
3) people acknowledge the signal exists but dont know how to influence their opinion with it
And 4) people try to understand the statistics involved in each instance to form a personal intuition on the signal strength
Imo I feel like the large majority of people are 1 (hence widespread stigmas that are overplayed) and then the large majority of anyone who isn't a 1 is a 2 and a smart-ass (meaning the 2s are not convincing the 1s to change). 3 is probably where most thinkers end up on most subjects, and 4 is very tedious to keep up with and has questionable reward value for doing so.
I've seen someone do the math on working out the probability for A|B when If A then B for some chosen example, but unfortunately I don't have the reference. Would be cool to see again.
To give a simple example though, assume A is English is the primary language someone knows and B is a preference for speaking and writing in English. If someone only knows English it follows they will speak and write in English. If someone speaks and writes in English, it does not follow that English is the only language they know.
If you see someone speaking and writing in english, there is obviously some signal there that they might only know English.
That signal changes depending on the % of English speakers who know a second language. And in fact, if 0% of English speakers spoke another language then suddenly If B then A does become a true statement.
I really wish I could instill this insight into everyone on Earth tbh. Misunderstanding that signal causes so many problems
Some of my favorite people have MBA degrees. "MBA" is an old stereotype, maybe unfair, especially today.
reply▲When did you earn your MBA?
reply▲Nice try, but this is the IoT wet dream pioneered by Nest Labs and a ton of other grizzled ex-SV hardware engineers.
reply▲Those engineers have been MBA-types in developer clothing for over 2 decades now.
The engineer as hacker hasn't been anywhere close to leadership roles for quite a while. Perhaps ever since the 90s. I don't see a passion for computing and hacking with such people, just for making money and VCs. That's why the end product doesn't even matter to them.
Yeah, no true scotsman, I mean no true software developer, would ever do anything like that.
Except Google, Meta and the like do exist.
That's neither here, nor there.
I didn't say they're not engineers or developers. I said they're not engineers/developers in the old hacker sense. They don't have a passion for computing and for making something, but for the money and VC schemes.
If you think Google and Meta is run with a passion for computing and hacking in mind, and that their products and actions reflect that, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Don't forget highly locked down garage doors that are readily accessible by major merchants. And also pair easily with similarly locked down in garage cameras.
reply▲convolvatron2 months ago
[-] I have a rental and I absolutely hate that thing. ads every time I want to leave the house. and it keeps switching to some kind of news updates that I have to click through to get to the open/close button. and it loses sync and needs to restarted all the time. constantly demanding that I link it to my amazon account. it really is dystopian
reply▲They've figured out a way to monetize garage doors. I agree with you, it is absolutely horrible.
They regularly break third party (unapproved) clients too. At the moment, pymyq and home assistant are broken.
VTimofeenko2 months ago
[-] I am actually looking for a wallmount garage door opener right now. While they do have myq-whatever cloud thing, my understanding is that it's optional. It should be possible to connect an ESP32 or the Konnected sensor thing which will pretend to be a wall button from the opener perspective. Could probably even stick it into a Faraday cage to prevent Amazon sidewalk scenario.
Is that not really an option?
A lot of newer garage door openers, especially Chamberlain, don't use simple contact switches on the wall any more. Hacking the remote in this way is still possible by disassembling the wall remote and simulating the button press itself, but it is a lot trickier than with simpler garage doors.
And myq cloud is horrible and worth avoiding. They used to have a homekit bridge, but they discontinued it.
VTimofeenko2 months ago
[-] Do you know if there's any non-myq jackshaft openers on the market?
reply▲For any app that does this, go to the App Store and give them a one-star rating and a comment on why you’re doing this.
In this case, they have a canned copy/paste answer saying that it’s for “security”, so feel free to try to debunk that in your initial comment.
local_crmdgeon2 months ago
[-] As someone that used to run a big app - this is effective. Upper management really cares about ratings/reviews/comments
reply▲> For any app that does this, go to the App Store and give them a one-star rating and a comment on why you’re doing this.
Also leave a 1-star review on Amazon. It's totally fair: if they can "update" their product, I can update my opinion of it.
Unfortunately for me (now), I bought all my Hue stuff at local stores because it was more convenient than Amazon.
I did this when they excluded other Zigbee lights from the hub, even though they had previously worked. They backed down on that, and maybe they will with this as well.
With that being said, I'm done with Hue.
Just left my first ever review just to voice my annoyance at this forced and pointless change.
reply▲hahaha, can't say I fee sorry for their customers
reply