For the lights themselves, near instantly. For the hub, I’d give it about 10-15 seconds. But if the Hub goes down, the lights will remain in their current on/off position.
Although the current problem with Hue bulbs is that if you power cycle them, they default to a warm white at full brightness. But an upcoming update will allow you to chose a default setting.
Glad to hear it. That’s nice.
That’s annoying. Harsh light gives me headaches. I need to wear computer glasses even for TVs lately, so I’m hoping these lights aren’t like that.
Also, how do they fare on dimmer switches? Most of the places I’m thinking about replacing are dimmers so I’m not sure how well that’d go.
For dimmers, they would work as long as the dimmer switch is set to 100%. You can dim the lights through software or the Hue switches.
The hue light strips are pretty great, too. But a bit expensive. As an alternative you can use something like this
http://agoeu.com/wf323-zigbee-full-color-slave-controller-dc-12v-24v-leynew-led-controller.html
To convert existing LED strips to be compatible.
Okay. That pretty much covers all my question. Thanks for the quick responses! (I think it’s time to let others join the fray)
We’ve got light strips already around the grill bar thing outside. Might have to try that thing out.
I’m assuming this ZigBee you mentioned above is a protocol or specification?
Its the protocol used, yeah. If you get a hue bridge, most ZigBee compatible bulbs will work with it (Worth a google to confirm specific bulbs).
One of the things stopping me from getting smart lights is the lack of control located on the bulbs themselves. It’s nice to be able to walk into a room and turn on all the lights, but I still want to be able to control individual lights without having to go through some app or indicate to a voice assistant which specific light I want to turn on or off. If I’m sitting in a chair and want to turn on the lamp next to me, I’d rather just reach over and turn on the light.
Ah, that makes sense. I wonder if there’s a solution in the works for that.
You could probably still do that with the right setup. I’m pretty sure you can also set up all lights as individual lights, and then set up room groups, you could use a physical switch to control side table lights as well.
Using a harmony ultimate, shield (uber chromecast), hue bulbs and a honeywell thermostat. Reason for the choices I made is that all those devices will still function without internet access. I glue it together via a google home and google assistant on the shield.
My Hue lights have physical switches I installed so people I haven’t given access to the system can turn off the lights.
General thought:
Maybe houses should have central hubs that are the only device with access to the home network. That way you would only have to secure one device instead of every single one of them.
I think I will take on the “I2C smart home” at some point…
A centralized target. If one got broken, all would be broken.
It’s like saying Apple should be the only phone manufacturer, or Facebook the only website.
After Hue gets updated to allow changing the defaults, you could totally do this. Have the room so that all the lights could be turned off/on, but then powercycle the lamp you wanted on if you only wanted one on.
You could also just get several switches. Be a bit expensive, but the switches can be set for a specific light, or the entire room. and you can have up to 50 devices on one hub currently.
As I see it, the problem with current day smart devices is every single one of them has to fight for themself and has hardware with more features than required.
Having a central hub that turns ethernet/blutooth/IR communication into I2C to trigger a predefined actions on some device on the bus should remove all the unnecessary features that more often than not are unsecured and easily exploited.
To make things clearer, an ATtiny15 will not be part of a DDOS attack but be sufficent to turn on your heating when the hub sends the correct time code.
You mean like Rube Goldberg?
Oh, I know there are workarounds, but that’s kind of my point. The smart lights on the market today don’t feel like complete products to me.
Truthfully, instead of smart light bulbs, I’d rather see lamps with smart sockets for dumb bulbs. They could still be controlled remotely, but for controls located on the lamp itself, I would envision some kind of dual-mode control: a basic mode where a tap turns it on/off and a 3-way mode where each tap steps through a few set dimmer settings. When you go and buy a lamp from Lamps Plus (or your local lighting emporium equivalent), you could have the choice between a traditional socket or a smart socket. Replacing lamp sockets is fairly easy and straightforward, so even just the sockets themselves sold separately for DIYers would be good — though that certainly wouldn’t be a good choice for most normies with no knowledge of wiring.
I have been toying with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi for quite a while. I haven’t gone too deep into it, like some people.
I have a mix of philips hue and xiaomi smart lights, that turn on when I walk from room to room. I use xiaomi motion sensors to detect motion in a couple of rooms and a hallway.
I have some xiaomi hall effect sensors on the main doors, which will alert me if they open when I am not at home.
As for mr bean lights, the bedroom one is in a ceiling fan with a remote, so I can override it and turn it on if I cant be arsed using my phone to do it.
Kind of reluctant to get one of those talking speaker boxes, even though South Park hit the nail on the head when they covered them. Home Assistant can intgreate with a wide range of equipment, so you are not locked into one system.
Other things I will automate in time:
This thread is giving me some good ideas.
My setup so far:
Piper security, it’s an all-in-one camera and zwave controller, no monthly fees. Added some light switches, door sensors ext. Modified a door sensor for my safe (mounted internally) and recently added a flood sensor for the bathroom.
Ran hassio for all of a few days, way too technical and diy. What I wanted from it was a) self hosted so not using company x server likely hosted on aws and b) step up the zwave control, for example be able to control a water main shut off valve.
Piper finally got on with IFTT so I can use Google assistant to turn on/off lights, blue tooth speaker etc.
Waiting for an all-in-one solution that has me sold, imo no one is there yet, but Samsung takes the lead with the smart things hub. Looks like amazon is getting into that scene as well.
That’s a wonderful idea. Then you don’t have to worry about major damage in the event of water in a not water place.
Yeah heard a few “went on vacation came home to a total loss” stories. I installed the water sensor on the bathroom floor- would be nice to automate valve closure in case I’m not by my phone. Amazon has a zwave butterfly valve actuator that bolts onto the pipe.
I’m just using pi’s + mobile app for lighting. One mostly useless thing I want to try is push notifications when the mail arrives (1st mailbox open of the day).
I have a bunch of smart outlets, lightbulbs, Sonos, and a logitech harmony hub, and control them via a bunch of echo dots. Nothing fancy, but it all works fine. I have all the IOT stuff on a separate VLAN that can’t connect to my home or lab LANs and block a bunch of telemetry via DNS blackholing in pihole.