An IP Address For Every Light Bulb 457
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday NXP and Green Wave Reality announced to the world that they plan to give every lightbulb an IPV6 address. Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality already has iPhone / Android / and Web-based support. Looks like the lighting wars have started."
Wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)
Architecturally, this is the wrong place to put uniquely addressed devices. The addresses should be in the fixtures, to avoid the maintenance headache of readdressing bulbs every time they are replaced. If I want the lights in the room to dim, I don't want to tell the bulbs, I want to tell the room that I'm sitting in. The room contains the fixtures. The fixtures contain the bulbs. How the room talks to the fixtures and the fixtures talk to the bulbs are different questions, but individually addressable bulbs is a maintenance disaster waiting to happen.
Just because they're conveniently end-user replaceable doesn't make it a correct choice, just slightly more practical. X-10, Z-Wave and Insteon are all also equally incorrect in that they generally put the control at the point of the switch, instead of the fixture. Again, the user's ultimate goal is not to control the switch but to control the room's lighting, which is defined by the fixtures and their locations within the room.
Re:Wrong place (Score:3, Insightful)
If you had an LED light bulb it might last long enough to be functionally equivalent to the fixture. I think it is pretty silly either way. This feature will consume additional electricity, and if you want to turn the light bulb on remotely the circuit has to be always on even when the bulb is off. This does not seem to be a good way to save energy.
Re:Now let's wait for someone to hack them (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wrong place (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if I want every lightbulb to have a consistent IP address when my ISP decides to give me a new prefix, I'd rather not want to renumber everything inside it. Or adjust all the settings.
Can you imagine? Your ISP decides to give you a new prefix and you'd have to program it into your switches so they can talk to the right lightbulbs again.
One of the benefits of NAT was the internal network was separated from the external - changes to the external IP addresses didn't influence the internal ones - simplifying management and administration. Some places don't mind going through the rigamarole, but I'm sure most homes have better things to do than manage their networks (if they even know how).
Sure you can assign more IPv6 addresses to ensure that your home server is always FC00::100, but having to know all the IP addresses of each machine when diagnosing things just gets to be a pain. Yes, you can use DHCPv6 to staticly assign addresses, but given how badly most devices handle DHCP IP address changes, it'll be a reboot fest.
Re:Wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)