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Elgato Unveils 'Eve' HomeKit Supported Smart Home Sensors, Hub-Less Smart Bulb

Takeo said:
I absolutely love it. But yah, there's no need to have them in every room of the house. I think Living room and Bedroom are about it. For entry, hall, closet, bathroom... I just use "dumb" bulbs.
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I have them through the house and like a totally red home to walk through late at night, and especially for those early wake ups or when I can't sleep and wake at stupid o'clock. I made a scene called night vision :D I tried green vision but its not dim enough though theres a forest scene available on phillips hue and thats kinda cool to walk round in/under but not when I'm bleary eyed.
 
peterh988 said:
That's what I want from these kind of bulbs more than anything. A 'set & forget' setup so I can carefully set a perfectly crafted colour scheme which can be remembered by the system, and the lights can be turned on and off at the wall switch, so that I don't have to instruct my 84 year old mother how to use an iDevice when she needs to visit the bathroom.
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you can do that today w/ Hue. not sure why people dont realize this....other than not owning the items in question and being ignorant of their use, of course.

wall switches work just fine on my Hue lamp bulbs -- turn em on, turn em off. only need an idevice if you want to set a mood recipe.
 
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Zxxv said:
So the lightbulb doesn't use a HUB.

Im away and I'm using timers and remoting in from my iPhone. The wifi in my house goes down.

How do my lights continue to work?



with phillips HUE the timers are in the hub so even if I can't remote in via iPhone or my wifi or internet goes down it still looks like I'm home. My home is protected. HUE continues to work.
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Very good point you got there that I didn't think about. Hue is still in front to my eyes
 
Takeo said:
The Phillips Hue at 600 Lumens is also pretty dim. Not really bright enough for general overhead lighting. Only really suitable for mood lighting (and the colours suck... not it's not even great for mood lighting).
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i disagree - my family loves the colors of the Hue bulbs. the Hue LED strips are RGB for super-saturated artificial colors, but cannot do natural, warm whites. the lamp bulbs are not RGB so cannot hit the same artificial color vibrancy, but excel at reproducing natural incandescent shades, while at the same time doing reds and ambers very well, and blues pretty well, and struggles w/ green (but i never use green lighting in the living room).

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alexgowers said:
Light switches are usually located just where you need them already and I challenge anyone to use an app faster than me leaning over for the switch.
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educate yourself -- systems like Hue work perfectly with a wall switch. my lamp bulbs default to a normal warm white when turned on/off via the switch.
 
So, lets see.. A wifi chipset, a pack of LEDs, associated power circuitry and plastic... Probably about $5 in parts. Call me when the markup gets below 1000%


Seriously... People arent stupid. These things are never really going to take off in the mainstream at these eye-gouging prices. Normal LED lightbulbs are getting into the sub-$10 range, we're really supposed to cough up another $40 for wifi?
 
mdelvecchio said:
wall switches work just fine on my Hue lamp bulbs -- turn em on, turn em off. only need an idevice if you want to set a mood recipe.
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I understand that, but I want the lights to remember their last setting, so that a guest can visit the bathroom, turn on the lights at the wall switch, and experience the wonderful colour concept I've created for that room.

If I decide the room should be bright purple, cycling the power at the wall switch will reset them to a basic white, meaning I'll have to reset the balance. Have I got that correct? Thats my current understanding, happy to be corrected.
 
Takeo said:
Even 1000 Lumens is not like a 100 watt bulb.
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Bingo - these are useless except for accent lighting. I'll stick with my horde of real, honest to goodness, 100 watt (and even some 150 watt) incandescent bulbs. The electricity is cheaper than all the doctors appointments for migraines and new glasses due to eye strain.
 
peterh988 said:
That's one possibility for other rooms, but in the case of the bathroom specifically, the on/off switch has to be on a cord-pull if it's inside the bathroom under UK regulations. (I think, happy to be corrected if I'm wrong)
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Put the hue app outside the bathroom or even in another room. You don't replace the switch. The switch remains on. The hue tap is battery less and works wirelessly just like a physical remote control. So the bathroom cord-pull doesn't make any difference :)
 
rdlink said:
Are you one of the people who said that internet commerce was going to clean out everyone's bank accounts?
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I did not mean 100% of houses will be hacked (as your stupid rhetorical question tries to imply), but given that all your appliances, electric grid, your car, etc. will be online, the incentive, the probability and potential damage of a hack will increase.

You must be one of those who said Wifi passwords would never be stolen, naked celebrities' pictures would never be leaked from supposed "super secure" servers, ATMs would never be hacked by 14 year old teens, entire gaming networks would never be taken down by attacks, millions of passwords of Facebook users would never be exposed, phishing and banking fraud would never cause millions of dollars of losses a year (which they do), etc.

You seem to be the typical smartass that oversimplifies things with pre-manufactured responses. Thinking a little bit before posting would do you good. Try it.
 
They need to make and LED Strip controller.

I just bought a WiLight pack from ebay works very well but the iOS app is terrible.
 
willyx said:
I did not mean 100% of houses will be hacked (as your stupid rhetorical question tries to imply), but given that all your appliances, electric grid, your car, etc. will be online, the incentive, the probability and potential damage of a hack will increase.

You must be one of those who said Wifi passwords would never be stolen, naked celebrities' pictures would never be leaked from supposed "super secure" servers, ATMs would never be hacked by 14 year old teens, entire gaming networks would never be taken down by attacks, millions of passwords of Facebook users would never be exposed, phishing and banking fraud would never cause millions of dollars of losses a year (which they do), etc.

You seem to be the typical smartass that oversimplifies things with pre-manufactured responses. Thinking a little bit before posting would do you good. Try it.
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Get personal and insulted much?

I'll quote you again, so perhaps you can remember what you did say:

"Can't wait for hackers to take control of every house. Appliances and lights randomly turning on and causing huge electricity bills, doors and windows opening at theft's will, alarms alerting the cops for nothing, smoke detectors bringing firemen to extinguish non existent fires... It's going to be fun."

Last time I checked, "take control of every house" would seem to imply 100%...

But to be fair, my point wasn't that I thought you were referring to the wholesale hacking of the whole world at one time. But your post seemed to imply that bedlam would ensue, which has been predicted before, and societal experience has proven does not happen.

My point was that... You know what. Never mind. I don't need to explain my point to someone intelligent enough to look at my post in relation to yours, and you obviously have no desire or ability to understand it...
 
fallenjt said:
It's bs to believe these bulbs or any LED bulb will last 20 years as claimed. 20 year lifespan is estimated for LED, but the bulb is more than just LEDs. For electronic components inside the bulbs manufactured in China, you'll be lucky to get 5 years out of them. Unfortunately, no company gives you 20 yr warranty for bulbs, so you're screwed. Unless the bulb can cook me a meal, I wouldn't spend my hard earned money on a $50 light bukb.
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Good point about the other components. I'm confident that the emitters would last for the rated 40,000 hours but maybe the other electronics wouldn't. Either way, I'm not replacing my entire house with them. I personally don't see the point. Or at least... I don't see it being worth the money. But having a few in ket rooms is great.

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peterh988 said:
I understand that, but I want the lights to remember their last setting, so that a guest can visit the bathroom, turn on the lights at the wall switch, and experience the wonderful colour concept I've created for that room.

If I decide the room should be bright purple, cycling the power at the wall switch will reset them to a basic white, meaning I'll have to reset the balance. Have I got that correct? Thats my current understanding, happy to be corrected.
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That's how LIFX works. I can't speak to any other system as I only have LIFX. But you can save "scenes" within the LIFX iOS app and recall them with a swipe and a tap. LIFX doesn't have a programmable wall switch but Hue does. So you can assign Hue "scenes" to the Hue Tap (a piece of hardware you stick on the wall). Which would be pretty nice.
 
It wouldn't take much for Philips to develop a hue wall switch. A tap that replaces our wall switches , but it'd cost money in production and probably no manufacturer wants to tool for the job so its cost productive through screw that its too much like hard work just to make the world a better place we are B players type attitude. So they make the hue tap which just sticks on the wall or and this is good sits on a bedside table or other surface requiring no wires or batteries. It's damn good but still half a job :)
 
Smart thinking....

Can't say the same for the price...

How to blow your wallet in one night with one of those rich type houses with games room too. Fill in every room and you've just thrown $200+ away easy.

It would have to be from Elgato.... they make good USB video decoders
 
How do the remote features work when you have dynamic IP, firewall, DHCP, etc., on your home network? I was thinking that it would be http port 80 or 443 where the device is periodically polling an external server for stored messages placed by the mobile app, but I am totally unfamiliar with these setups.

I can get to my home Mac with Back to my Mac when I am away, which works somehow even with the firewall and the dynamic IP, I guess using my Apple ID but how do the other third party Homekit companies handle traversing the network to get to the devices behind the cable router?
 
Aniseedvan said:
Agreed - my Withings scale has it. I think I looked at it twice since I bought it 15 odd months ago...
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Sort of. I think I may have the same scales and although not the reason I bought them, it did remind me to open the windows more during the winter and air the place...
 
I don't exactly understand how these light bulbs work..
Most electric light circuits use a switch and a light. You obviously don't want to remove the manual switch..
So if my grandpa turns off the light with the manual switch, there is no way for me to turn it back on with my phone, right? Because there is no power.

Shouldn't these guys make switches for homekit in stead of the light bulbs?
 
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