Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don't want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.
Philips Hue: You can use the phone app to control individual bulbs directly with bluetooth, but for more control you need also the Hue brigde, which talks to the bulbs over Zigbee (a wireless protocol), and to your phone app over your wifi. For initial setup, the bridge needs an internet connection, but otherwise it will work as long as your home wifi is up, even if there is no connection to outside internet. The features (timed schedules, scenes) live in the Hue brigde, so everything works also without outside internet.
LIFX: No Zigbee, no bridge. These bulbs connect to your 2.4GHz home wifi. More advanced features (schedules, scenes) live in the LIFX company server, so won't work without internet connection. But without outside internet connection, you can still use the phone app via your wifi router to control the color and brightness of individual bulbs. If you're a home automation hobbyist, you can give color and brightness commands to LIFX bulbs over your 2.4Ghz wifi, so you can program your own timed schedules that would work without outside internet connection.
Other smart bulbs: Cheaper. Philips Hue and LIFX are the two most expensive.
I understand LIFX is best for bright colors. But Philips Hue bulbs don't contain just RGB leds, but also leds for white and warn white, so the bulb may have 5 different types of leds. So Philips might produce better near-white "natural" light than same colors produced by combining only red,green,blue leds. Not sure if this matters to everyone or only to some lighting connoisseurs.
As someone who had Lifx due to them not needing a controller, don't buy them their software sucks. It worked fine for months at a time, but would then decide it no longer wanted to obey commands and you'd have to re-pair it, which usually took 30 minutes and 5 failed attempts where it would fail during the setup process after resetting the bulb.
Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).
Eventually my bulbs died and I haven't gone back to smart lighting yet (though I'm considering ordering some hue or Ikea bulbs).
If you check /r/lifx on Reddit it's basically filled with people complaining about lifx's awful software.
In my experience the ikea bulbs are also awful, constant unpairing requiring multiple attempts to re-pair with the remote, especially if you have multiple bulbs in close proximity. In the end I gave up and just use them as normal bulbs. It would be a nice setup if it worked though, having a dedicated remote control is much more convenient than using a phone imo.
Damn, I was hoping they'd be a good hue alternative because I don't want to pay hue prices. I was looking at nanoleaf as they're using Thread, but they don't have any basic bridges (only homekit, eero, or one of their rgb wall panel things, none of which are things I want) and won't speak Matter.
At this point I feel like I might as well wait for Matter bridges to come out this fall, as hopefully companies will refresh their product lines then and we'll get some better quality lights.
The ikea setup might be worth a shot with the networking bridge they have to control multiple bulbs at once, but my experience with individual bulbs was bad.
> Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).
Interesting. I have lifx bulbs going back to the first generation Kickstarter products and I've never had one die yet. I use them daily.
From what I understand the number one cause of led bulb failures is heat, which causes things like capacitors to fail prematurely or poor connections to break from the repeated expansion.
All my bulbs are used in lamps or fixtures which are not enclosed which means they have plenty of ventilation.
You'd think being in the same room as a Unifi UAP AC Pro in a non crowded area with a dedicated 2.4ghz ssid would fix those wifi issues, but it didn't.
I’ve a couple of LIFX bulbs in my home. I paired them directly to the Apple HomeKit Home app and never bothered with LIFX‘a app. They’ve been 99% reliable for me for about three years now. I don’t know if I’m lucky or that avoiding their app was worth it.
In my experience this is more reliable, but there's something off about the color temperature selections available within the Home app. LIFX bulbs have less than great color to begin with (their warm whites feel sickly and sallow), but it has the same problem with Hue. I end up setting colors within the Hue or LIFX app and then going "the color that is currently set" in Home. So not using their app has drawbacks too.
I have Nanoleaf bulbs that connect to my phone via Bluetooth. It’s kinda fun, these are my first ever RGB bulbs, but it’s super slow and finicky. I will probably upgrade to the Philips next year.
I used Google Home for a while, but honestly it was a pretty bad experience as time went on.
I've used Home Assistant[0] for the last 8-9 months. It works great and has support for every device I used with Google Home. It also has bridges so that you can still use Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant for voice commands if you want that. The mobile app is good enough. It isn't as user friendly as Google Home, but it's not terrible and way more powerful.
You can run it on your own hardware, e.g. a NAS or Raspberry Pi, and they also sell purpose made hardware[1]
Using a zig-a-zig-ah stick in combination with a raspberry pi 3/4 running zigbee2mqtt is surprisingly stable, compared to the slightly cheaper alternatives [0] and works quite okay in combination with home assistant.
But to be honest I'll be looking into getting a Home Assistant Yellow as well as this seems to be easier.
I just want some lights that expose a simple API and are easy to talk to. I want smart lights that will work when the internet is down and doesn't need an app to connect to.
It is the bridge that provides the REST API, not the bulbs.
Having a REST API means the complete setup is easier to tinker with through a defined protocol and not having to resort to hack with the bulbs or any zigbee/low-level things.
I used this to play a bed time indication sequence on multiple bulbs in the living room from MIDI notes.
There's another problem with many these smart lights, IMHO.
A lightbulb should be a long-lasting, easily replaceable thing. Putting in all sorts of doodads into the base of lightbulb just strikes me as wasteful and a recipe for a brittle configuration. It's bad enough putting in a power converter, now we're talking about RF transceivers, computers, webservers, and REST API's. All this packed into a tiny very hot space packed in with silicone goop and made, often times, by disinterested bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers.
It's much better, I think, to have the light bulbs be just that, LIGHTBULBS. Of course, they can be LED's, DC powered and have multiple colors but the control and power source should be in a box away from the lights, somewhere convenient. You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light.
This would ultimately give interior designers a better palette of light sources to work with and give consumers a less annoying churn of bad choices for technology.
> You can then put all the internet-of-things jazz into THAT BOX and not in each light.
How do you propose to do this in a lamp or a can light with a standard light socket? Should I rip open my ceiling and add control wires to every can that's in there?
These bulbs don't have the smarts in them just because nobody thought of doing otherwise. The world is mostly made of legacy infrastructure. Hue will sell you lamps that don't use E26 bulbs, but you're not going to be changing the lights out later if you want to use something else.
So now there are two standards that are mutually exclusive--"works in every light made in the last hundred years" and "the other one".
I sense great commercial success here, telling people to run LV to every HV can light. And how about--you know--a lamp? Like the one standing on my floor right now, with nowhere to place an external box? Should we redesign them all for this new standard that doesn't address actual pain points? How do we power the control boxed? Does every lamp now have a chaining 120V and you need to hang an AC adapter off it, then weasel control wires into the lamp shade? Or do we expect them to output 12V in case you want to run them with automated controls? Or do we expect them to just pick a vendor, build in their control box and you throw out the lamp if the software sucks? In a lamp?
This solves a problem people don't have through the time-tested strategy of making people think more, do more work, and be more annoyed. I think I'm seeing why it doesn't exist.
I am talking about permanent fixtures here. And anyway, there ARE 12VDC lights without a bunch of electronics junk inside them. They're readily available for folks and designers who want _really_ _nice_ lighting.
The MagicLight app works pretty well, doesn't require cloud (though they will try and get you to sign up) and you can automate through home assistant or look at the API yourself.
Home Assistant, but you'll spend more than a weekend getting things settled. Still, I love how open and free the platform is for most of its users. It really is an incredible example of open source software.
I won't link them because I don't want to get flagged for spam, but I really like the bulbs from cloudfree[dot]shop. They come pre-flashed with Tasmota and take <5 minutes to set up, then they can be controlled directly over wifi, or can easily be connected with HomeAssistant, etc. (Tasmota is open source local-only firmware, so there's no cloud or anything to worry about.) My only complaint is that they're not super duper bright. Other than that, I'm a big fan! Big fan of products from that site generally, and the guy behind it seems solid.
I bought some plugs from them so I didn't have to go flash something myself with tasmota. Good customer service, but these days I'm mostly buying Z-Wave stuff from the smartest house (zooz)
Philips Hue has a pretty well understood protocol that you can run entirely locally. There are Linux CLI controllers, for example. The official app works well enough but it’s reassuring to not be locked in.
In my local hardware store, they sell remote controlled light bulbs where you can change color temperature, RGB too. Of course you can find similar products online, including Amazon, AliExpress... Look for RGBWW. These exist as LED strips too.
No apps, networking, or anything, nothing to configure, just IR remote control.
