I'm with you that the lack of wifi may have been fine back then, but now it is a bit odd. And even if you have a "technical room" with wired ethernet, the hub button-auth interaction still is a bit odd.
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CES 2018: Philips Hue Announces iOS App Redesign, 'Hue Sync' for macOS, and Outdoor Bulbs Coming Mid 2018
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I'm with you that the lack of wifi may have been fine back then, but now it is a bit odd. And even if you have a "technical room" with wired ethernet, the hub button-auth interaction still is a bit odd.
Each person should decide how they want their lighting. It is personal preference. The general design rule of thumb though is that you light features not spaces. Thus your kitchen prep area would have task lighting perhaps under the cabinets. Some people prefer to just turn on the torch for their living room but what happens is everything becomes bland and no artwork or architecture can pop. Be wary of people that recommend buying bulbs on lumen numbers alone they often have poorly lit space regardless.
My preferred method would still work with this. In my houses I have smart switches that are still intuitive for people who have never seen one before (the handyman wouldn't be baffled as to how to turn on my lights) but I would still have Philips default the flag system I suggested to behave like it does on power off/on so legacy switches would work as expected out of the box. The big difference under my suggestion is that the system installer would be able to (optionally) set a nonvolatile setting to switch that behavior off so that full installations like mine behave properly too. It's not a big technical hurdle to support both but so far Philips has refused to address it at all.
Further, even in your scenario it should be expected that a default scene can be provided on that power on event. The default color temp for Philips hue is far too warm for my liking so in the rooms I use traditional switches I end up having to tell Siri to switch the scene every time I turn them on to give me a brighter, whiter light.
Or it could just be the way the space was designed. I have three 50s era glass domes on the ceiling of the kitchen. The two over the counters have the 100 watt Cree bulbs. The one in the center has a hue RGB and over the cabinet is a Lightify RGB strip. Short of a kitchen remodel that's not changing. It is on the list but a $100 solution works for now.
My response was geared to the "you're doing it wrong" comment. The OP didn't say what he wanted the 100 watt bulbs for, just that he wanted them.
I'm fully aware of quality over quantity. My living room alone has 30 GU10 fixtures (wanting to order more soon) with RGB bulbs set at a precise distance from the walls to show off my photography.
Take a look at iConnectHue. I still prefer the original app for setup and simple light on/off commands, but for complex scenarios iConnectHue is more powerful.
I have a task light over the kitchen sink which turns on via a Hue motion sensor. The rest of the time the main lighting along that wall is a Lightstrip which shows off the tiles and lights the entire kitchen bench along that side. I originally tried a bulb over 1000 lumens but found it too much. The Hue bulb ended up being perfect for our kitchen.
I used to have this issue until I got an electrician to install a relay in my switchboard that kills the light circuit when the power fails, requiring me to manually switch the circuit back on. I can also turn off this function so if I'm away it will restore the light circuit.
Now I'm not woken at 2am with all lights on 100% brightness after a 1 minute power failure - a frightening way to wake up!
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You still have 11 connections (from each of your bulbs to the hub), plus an additional connection from the hub to HomeKit (total of 12). All 12 show up on HomeKit versus only 11 if there was no hub.
Maybe your point is that only one is "directly" connected to HomeKit, but not sure how that makes a difference. If anything it's worse because the bulbs have to talk to the hub, which in turn talks to HomeKit. In my experience, that scheme is less reliable than the accessories being directly connected to HomeKit, and hence why most people prefer to avoid hubs.
It used to be the case that every device on a wireless network would cut the capacity in half. This is no longer entirely accurate, but it is not difficult to end up with say 30 bulbs, which would make any wireless network struggle. With the bridge, bulbs end up on a separate network (and hopefully different frequencies). There is also the additional benefit of the mesh topology, which means that every bulb you add extends the reach of the network.
For many IoT devices direct wifi connections make sense. Lightbulbs are different. Another example would be Sonos, that performs better when allowed to create its own network. Sonos has built all the necessary bridge hardware into every speaker (and requires an ethernet cable). That is something Philips probably has considered, but as I wrote earlier, there are practical issues in addition to the technology / cost issues.
Is your last light state honestly something the handyman wouldn't be able to walk around you apartment with and would require someone to remote in to change the settings?
Apartments, in particular rentals, are a prime reason to support the off to on functionality as renters will not have the option to install switches better suited to smart lighting and even sticking Hue Dimmers on the wall may be an issue with the owner.
There's not a chance this is really about emergency's. Why? Because Philips own dimmers and the TAP do not have this behaviour. If they wanted lights going from off to on to go to a default state their own switches would do this. Why would they have this safety policy that in turn doesn't apply to their own switches?
The other thing is smart switches designed for lights will not cut power to them but rather use zigbee to toggle the state (as Hues switches do). Again Philips would be well aware of this and again in this scenario still allow a re-instate of the last configuration.
Even on the very off chance there was a safety concern, they could implement some boundary conditions for going from off to on where by a minimum brightness of 20 or 30% will be applied to prevent the lights turning off at only 10% lighting levels. That'd negate the inadequate light concern if one existed, and mean that the vast majority of people that are more upset that the hue has shifted rather than the brightness levels are catered for.
You can work around this with some scripting on the hub, but then that has to be on a UPS to be effective because it reboots after a power loss as well.
FWIW Ikea Tradfri bulbs remember their last color temp and brightness when power toggled (even when used with a hue gateway), though if they are shut "off" via app they come on to 100% of the last color. You could set the brightness to 1% and it would remain 1% after a toggle (which is effectively off).
FWIW Ikea Tradfri bulbs remember their last color temp and brightness when power toggled (even when used with a hue gateway), though if they are shut "off" via app they come on to 100% of the last color. You could set the brightness to 1% and it would remain 1% after a toggle (which is effectively off).
I didn't mean the HomeKit connections, I meant the bulbs all needing to connect via WiFi vs whichever protocol they use now. Zigbee, I think?
There are several things going on in that thread and other related threads that repeatedly pop up on the Hue developers forum:
- Some people want to choose (one time) a different default powerup color/brightness for the bulbs (say, cool white instead of warm white). This is probably feasible - could be written into the bulb's nvram along with the firmware.
- Others want each bulb to remember its last state whenever power is removed, so they can plug them into switched outlets. This is likely not feasible, as it would require rewriting part of the bulb's nvram every single time the light is commanded to go to a different state (changing brightness/color/on-off). It's entirely possible the nvram and associated electronics weren't designed to handle constant rewrites (this would require a lifetime of tens or hundreds of thousands of rewrites, instead of dozens of rewrites, and the may not have the ability to rewrite only a portion of the nvram). You'd also have plenty of chances for bad edge cases where the bulb receives a state change, and then, in the middle of writing that to nvram, power is lost, potentially bricking the bulb. This path is also akin to someone buying a Tesla and saying, "yeah, but I don't want to wire up a charger in my house, so just show me where to put in the gas" - putting Hue bulbs in switched sockets is a sign that you don't fully get the concept - being powered all the time is a fundamental part of their design.
- An alternative would be for the hub to be capable of resetting each bulb, upon powerup, to a user-chosen default (also feasible, akin to the first scenario above), or to be capable of resetting each bulb, when they power up, to their last selected state (likely not feasible for the same reason as above, would require the hub to be constantly rewriting some of its nvram - unless you put the hub on a UPS and it just kept the current state in memory and was able to restore it when the bulbs came back online, but many/most wouldn't warm up to the idea of needing a UPS just for their Hue hub).
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These look interesting. My own main interest, personally, is to have something like f.lux for my home lighting. I see they have a "day & dusk" light (no other colors, which is fine with me) but it's only 800 lumens, which is a bit low. The full-spectrum ones they offer are 1100 lumens, but seem to be quite a bit more expensive.
Hopefully we will start seeing higher lumen bulbs in this connected bulb space generally. I guess high heat is rough with the electronics? I'm not sure, but those sad little "40 watt equivalent" smart bulbs just don't cut it at all unless you have a ton of them ($$$).
I'm currently using dimmable (non-connected) Philips LEDs that go warmer in color temperature as they dim down, and put out 1600 lumens each. I've got two of them in a lamp in my living room and at 100% it's easily enough to light the room well.
Yeah, could be that the heat and chip don't play well together but then again LED's don't like heat either. Even most "dumb" LEDs are not rated to go in an enclosed fixture and will usually die prematurely if they are used in those.
I don't really have a problem using ONE hub for the Hue lighting, but I plan to expand my home automation with other stuff, thermostats, locks and whatnot, and more of these thing will require hubs. I don'r want to end up with 10 different hubs.
It would be great if Apple would add ZigBee and Z-Wave to iPads, AppleTVs and the upcoming HomePod, so that they can act as hubs for all the other things. If you have Hue lights, then just install the Hue app on the iPad (and that includes code for the iPad/AppleTV/HomePod to act as a hub for the lights). If you later get other home automation things, then just install the appropriate software to make your iPad/AppleTV/HomePod.
Since those Apple products also have a lot more memory than the Philips hub, there's also the possibility for it to handle more than 50 light bulbs, and also more complex scenes and user rights management.
It would be great if Apple would add ZigBee and Z-Wave to iPads, AppleTVs and the upcoming HomePod, so that they can act as hubs for all the other things. If you have Hue lights, then just install the Hue app on the iPad (and that includes code for the iPad/AppleTV/HomePod to act as a hub for the lights). If you later get other home automation things, then just install the appropriate software to make your iPad/AppleTV/HomePod.
Since those Apple products also have a lot more memory than the Philips hub, there's also the possibility for it to handle more than 50 light bulbs, and also more complex scenes and user rights management.
I started putting in Hue bulbs when we moved into a new house. It's worked out well, even if the app sucks. The integration with the Amazon Echo was a nightmare, but has gotten much better over the last few months. I don't get the fuss about the hub. It sits in a corner with the rest of the network hardware. I'll be happy when they put out a Mac app for it. Sometimes you just need more screen real estate to set things up.
I got all the standard Hue color schemes ported over to/as HomeKit scenes at some point, though at the moment I can't remember exactly how (there is a "Sync with Siri" option of some sort in the setup menu, but I don't recall if that'a how I did it). "Set reading" and "Set relax" are two of my most used Siri commands at home, and do exactly what the Hue choices do. I find commanding HomeKit to arbitrary colors rather less useful (though "dim my living room lights by 30%" is quite handy).
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How many light bulbs do you normally carry around with you?
I don't like dongles hanging off the phone or laptop I'm actively using. I don't care about Home automation hubs that sit unobtrusively in a corner, untouched, doing their job.
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Put your home network in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network space, and you'll have 16 million IPv4 addresses to play with. I doubt anyone owns enough devices to overflow that. And 99.9% of the time, the bulbs will be passively listening for commands, using no network resources. I don't mind the Hue bridge at all, but those aren't very strong reasons to avoid individually addressable bulbs or other IoT devices. If they're using mDNS and DNS-SD (essentially Apple's Bonjour) to tell each other of their existence, that'll provide a little traffic, but still down in the noise.
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The Hue Bridge is a connection point from one network into another, but much more than a "bridge" in standard networking terminology - it isn't simply relaying/translating packets from one network to another, there's a lot more going on. The Hue Bridge accepts high level commands (roughly, things like "set scene x") via a RESTful HTTP interface on the IP side, does internal processing/lookup, and then issues a whole slew of lower level commands to individual lights out on the Zigbee side.
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Indeed, bright light is helpful from time to time. I used to have a 300watt halogen torchiere in my living room for the occasions I just wanted it ridiculously bright (cleaning, building something, etc.). I replaced it with a 600 LED panel designed for video lighting, plugged into an iDevices Switch. I don't use it often, but occasionally it's quite helpful to tell Siri "set everything" and make the living room really bright. For day-to-day lighting, I just use the Hue lights.
Before expanding, they should fix the foundation: right now there still is no way to back up your setup, i.e. if a bridge fails (as it did for me), there is no way to restore the configuration. Everything needs to be set up again (lights, scenes, potentially days of work...)! There is also no failover, i.e. your home could be left without lights if the bridge fails. I am not saying they should be entirely P2P like KNX is, but if they want to be trusted they should at least support backup, restore, and automatic dual bridge failover (not just to handle failures, but also to keep working during bridge updates).
Exciting news and here’s to hoping that outdoor means they will introduce a par16 and a par30 light. I tried the BR30 floodlight in my kitchen and the socket fit but the necks were too long to fit into the commercial slots. I’ve had Hues installed for about a month now and I’m loving them so far paired with an Echo and using HomeKit. I’ve found HomeKit does a better job with guessing what I’m trying to say whereas the Hue skill for Alexa requires me to be precise in order for the voice command to register.
True. I've had one crap out already. It was in a semi-enclosed metal clip-on lamp, which may have been the problem. The main ones I use are very well ventilated, though. Given the electronics inside, I'll be pleasantly surprised if all the LED bulbs I bought over the last year or so end up with the long lifespans they're supposedly good for.