Smartest Light Bulbs Ever, Dumbest Idea Ever? 235
An anonymous reader writes "A spate of smart LED bulbs and light sockets are coming to market and seeking crowdfunding, following the (apparent) success of Philips Hue. But do they really make sense for lighting control? Here's a comprehensive roundup of 13 products and the pros and cons of the category." I like the idea of controllable, long-lasting light bulbs, but I haven't yet been tempted enough to pay $50 apiece.
Dumbest story title, ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not by a large margin. Also not "dumbest idea ever", but putting this in the title _is_ pretty dumb. Seems somebody is craving attention at any cost.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Nah, just the stock Slashdot "we hate energy efficiency" rant applied to the next generation of products.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
El
Re:Dumbest story title, ever? (Score:4, Interesting)
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Fluorescent lights give me a headache. I don't care if this is supposed to be medically possible, since it happens to me. They all do it, though some are substantially worse than others. So-called "daylight" fluorescents are the worst, e.g. ott-lite. Those give me a headache in record time.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
Only idiots believe that solar panels take more energy to make than they will produce, which has been false since the 1970s.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
My problem with IGPs is that they are from intel in which case they really are shit (I actually play games in 3d, this is no longer a corner case since the majority of the population of the USA plays video games) or from AMD in which case the drivers are shit. I've owned several systems with embedded nVidia graphics. That's in the chipset, though.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
There's at least as much support for EVs here as against.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
Re:Dumbest story title, ever? (Score:5, Informative)
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT.
Cree makes good bulbs because they are driving demand for their LEDs - Cree and Philips are probably neck-and-neck for the lead position in the LED market.
They've got a 40-watt equivalent for $10 at Home Depot and a 60-watt for $14.
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?356710-Cree-A19-9-5w-60w-800lm-2700K-for-13-97 [candlepowerforums.com]
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I have some cree flashlights, and those are cool. The Cree LED lamps look credible [designingwithleds.com] so perhaps I will give them a try. Cree flashlights certainly use flicker to dim, but these have big caps so perhaps they have a real power supply in there.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem I have with Crees is th form factor. We have recessed lighting in our kitchen, mostly R30, and the fixtures are 40 years old, certainly superseded by newer standards. Regular R-30 bulbs fit perfectly. The Cree equivalents take some work to fit right, especially the ones with the built-in bezels.
That said, I love the light they produce. It's a bit brighter, and only slightly whiter than the light the 65W incandescents put out, at a fifth the power consumption.
I have one question for the pick-y
Re:Dumbest story title, ever? (Score:4, Funny)
I have one question for the pick-your-color manufacturers: Have you ever consulted an interior designer? The colors of paint, fabric, etc. in a room are all picked with specific lighting in mind, both natural and from lamps. Start futzing with it, and things will start looking crappy.
Thanks for this post. I was running out of material for my "First World Problems" meme generator. But this is pure gold :)
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"Cree and Philips are probably neck-and-neck for the lead position in the LED market."
Not even close, Cree wins. I just got hold of their MK-R diodes. At 100ma, not bad. [imgur.com] At 300mA, it starts to hurt your eyes and it lights up fairly nicely. [imgur.com] At 500mA you need to start shielding your eyes. [imgur.com] Here's video of it, 500mA, lighting my nearly-dark living room/dining room. [youtu.be] (camera auto-adjusted some, hence all the extra video noise and artificially-high starting light levels.)
At 500mA, that's 6w. 6w nearly lights up (~
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That's good but really we want to get away from having one massive light in the middle of the room and move to many smaller lights where they are needed. You get better working light and fewer shadows that way.
Re:Dumbest story title, ever? (Score:5, Informative)
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
Microcenter has "40W" house-brand Inland LED bulbs for $6.99, dimmables for a buck more. They work great in my house, and I haven't had a single one go bad or burn out in the year or two since I started getting them. They seem to be well built, and have nice solid heat sinks, though the one here in my desk lamp is cool enough to touch (and by touch, I mean put your fingers on it and hold them there) anywhere on the lamp body.
Our kitchen uses two of these bulbs in the fixture, and its as bright as it's ever been with any other bulbs.
On the subject of 'smart lighting' - $50~70 is too much for a bulb, but it speaks to the X-10 enthusiast in many of us to be able to control lighting at the source... but the price needs to come way down. I expect that to happen as production ramps up. Given a cheap interface chip, China could pump the components out for less than a dollar premium on a BOM for a smart bulb. Tie that in with efficient, color-changing LEDs and you could sell them all day long at Wal*Mart for $15 each and make a good profit.
Realistically, "smart lighting" is the way to get people to buy the more expensive LED bulb, anyway.... there is more perceived value in buying a consumable product that can also do cool things. Forget the fact that LED bulbs are far cheaper, in the long run, simply based on lifespan, let alone energy cost, to purchase over any other type of bulb. CFLs don't help the cause of buying energy efficient lighting, since they sometimes last no longer than regular bulbs, yet cost two or three times as much (again, forgetting energy cost savings). Give consumers a neat capability with that expensive cost, and they'll be far more interested as they see more "value" in buying LED bulbs... but that doesn't happen at a $50 price point for 99% of the consumers out there. At $15, yes, it probably becomes more viable for people to start lighting their homes with LEDs.
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How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT.
I've been buying the Phillips candelabra 3.5 watt LEDs at Home Depot as my kitchen lights burn out. They go for around $15 each, and they aren't bad. I go from 200 watts to 28 watts. I tried various CFL candelabra bulbs... not THOSE are "all shit". :)
Now, payback period is another matter... it'll take 5800 hours of run time just to break even (on electricity.... yes, I'm neglecting the non-zero cost of replacement incandescents) at $0.12/kw-h. That's 5 years at 3 hours per day! So my investment strategy is
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No, your investment strategy is sound. They will last longer than 5800 hours so you eventually come out ahead. In fact, they're probably rated for 50,000 hours. But before I decide which grandchild gets mine, :) during winter the lights in my home's common area are on for more than 3 hours a day. Assuming 8 hours a day is just over 17 years and break even becomes less than 2 years. It's also nice to see the porch light using less than 10 watts.
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Mentioning the benefits of heat in the winter without mentioning the cost in summer seams disingenuous.
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I've bought many LEDs over the past two years. You can now get good A19 bulbs for $10 to $15 and good br30 for $20 to $25. Things are moving fast in led lighting. In addition to established brands Toshiba and Phillips I've been impressed with bulbs from Kobi and G7. There are too many companies entering the market to count and plenty of junk to avoid (stuff at Lowes), but LEDs are certainly improving quickly.
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CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Fluorescent lights give me a headache. I don't care if this is supposed to be medically possible, since it happens to me. They all do it, though some are substantially worse than others. So-called "daylight" fluorescents are the worst, e.g. ott-lite. Those give me a headache in record time.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
Only idiots believe that solar panels take more energy to make than they will produce, which has been false since the 1970s.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
My problem with IGPs is that they are from intel in which case they really are shit (I actually play games in 3d, this is no longer a corner case since the majority of the population of the USA plays video games) or from AMD in which case the drivers are shit. I've owned several systems with embedded nVidia graphics. That's in the chipset, though.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
There's at least as much support for EVs here as against.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
===
Last week at our local Costco, the lights were on sale for $4.00 for a 850 lumen led array. That was the price with a coupon from our electric company. Montreal is a city that 95% of all homes and establishments are electrically heated. My electricity rate varies from 4 per kwh to 7.2 With those rates, gas, and oil cannot compete. We are not allowed to burn wood in our fireplaces, because of the polution. I am happy to live in a city where the snow is white from the time it falls until the spring whe
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I guess it's a good thing CFLs don't flicker at 50-60Hz, then.
Cheap ones don't flicker fast enough to not be immediately perceptible, however. Nor do they last worth a crap, nor work in the cold, etc etc. I use them where I don't need light soon, or much light, or for very long. That means I am using about three of them, in a three bedroom house. I use fluorescent only in the kitchen, where there's four tubes with mixed warm and cool white. Everywhere else I use incandescent when I use the light at all. I turn off lights when I'm not using them, so the power consumpti
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I use them where I don't need light soon, or much light, or for very long
I actually use this to my advantage in bathrooms. I have a line of small globe lamps on the top of the vanity. 5 of them are cold-cathode CFL lamps, which are VERY slow to warm up. 1 of them is a regular incandescent. When you flick on the lights in the middle of the night, you are not greeted with blinding light - the lights take about a minute to come up to full brightness. I normally hate the way my face looks in the mirror with CFL bulbs, but the single incandescent brings the quality of light way up.
If
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Sounds plausible. As I am using mainly CFLs and beginning to replace them with LED bulbs, I am just not really equipped to understand that stance.
There are quite a few people complaining about CFLs that never bothered to find out anything about them. Like "too white","too yellow": Use a different color temperature? Take some time to get to full intensity: So what? Cannot be dimmend: Wrong, just buy those that can be. Etc.
Or my favorite: Will poison you with a lot of mercury when dropped! Unfortunately, ther
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I have not found any LEDs that I have liked yet. CRI is way off even the cheapest CFLs, in the mid 70%. They also haven't figured out quality control, one bulb will have a green tint the other yellow. LED also gets very inefficient when you get to high powers.
I've even tried fixtures worth thousands of £'s in photography. The discontinuous spectra is a massive problem, and CRI values cannot really be used. Give this a look, the Academy of Motion Picture and Sciences did some tests on LEDs: http://www. [oscars.org]
Temperatures (Score:3)
I just wish more came in 4000K rather than 3200K.
Most people use lighting at night, before going to bed. There's a fair bit of research to the effect that high-temperature light before sleep interferes with sleep quality.
Office lighting is another matter entirely -- there, high temperature light is not only good for vision but increases alertness.
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By high temperature light, you mean "cool" lighting? As opposed to "warm" low-temperature lighting? We need better terms.
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I've been replacing my (highly unreliable) CFLs with LED bulbs as I find deals, starting about a year and a half ago. I've seen decent, non dimmable bubs for as low as $10 and dimmables by Phillips for as low as $14. I've yet to have an LED bulb fail whereas there was always a flaky CFL or three, somewhere in the house. The light quality does vary a bit but none of the LEDs I've used are worse than CFLs in that regard. I've seen no flickering or significant turn on delays.
I l
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I also tried CFLs and went back to incandescent. Last year when good quality LED bulbs became commonplace I got over my sticker-shock and bought a bunch of LEDs. I appreciate that when a kid leaves a light on it's only using 9 watts instead of 60. Folks don't realize LED bulbs pay for themselves in about two years and last about 10 so the upfront cost shouldn't be a consideration. Even with the Phillips Hue at US$59 will more than pay for itself in energy savings before it stops working.
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Nice to finally see someone posting here who actually grasps the value of a high CRI.
I'm sick of dimwits blindly recommending a lower or higher color temperature when someone complains about the low light quality of current energy saving bulbs. Color temperature isn't the big problem: our brain easily adapts to a different white balance. Whole swats of spectrum missing is, as that makes a lot of pigments look dull.
So let's hope for lamps that can produce a continuous weighted spectrum from 650 to 400 nm wit
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I wish those had been at Home Depot when I bough a bunch of LED bulbs. Does the yellow visible inside mean that they are using remote phosphors like the Philips Ambients? If so these are a winner.
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CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
I find the five minutes or so they take to "warm up" a bit annoying, but what I can't live with is the poor colour rendering and unbelievable amounts of RF noise they put out. The fact that they draw slightly more power than comparable incandescents (as measured by the fuel flow meter on the generator) just puts the icing on the cake, for me.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
I'd prefer an RTG, but no-one seriously cares that they take more energy to produce than they make. What they do is they make it possible to produce energy quietly a
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CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die
It does drive me crazy that we are expending effort and technology to emulate the yellow color of incandescent bulbs. Are buggy whips still mandatory in modern cars?
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And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale - Still pretty damned expensive, but in the "worth it" range for the handful of lights you use the most.
You missed the point. This wasn't about LED bulbs. This was mainly about "smart" bulbs... networked or color-changing or both.
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If you only consider energy cost, the quick answer is "yes" (and LEDs are slightly more efficient). LEDs have other benefits that make them much more attactive, e.g., suitable for applications where CFL are not, color temperature, light distribution pattern, etc.
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Slightly more efficient?
Typical CFL - ~70-80 lumens per watt.
Cree MK-R LED - 200+ lumens per watt. At typical junction temps, 160+ lumens per watt.
And killer color rendering.
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No doubt about the attention seeking, it's always something. Either daddy touched them too much or not enough.
Buncha whining about nothing I found a bulb half that price immediately. http://www.walmart.com/ip/21618983?wmlspartner=wlpa&adid=22222222227000000000&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=&wl3=21486607510&wl4=&wl5=pla&veh=sem [walmart.com]
Damn I can even get LED freaking grow lights for less than $50.
Where is this guy, on the moon?
Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
*facepalm*
I can't think of anything worse than a bulb that's at the mercy of your WiFi router. My router falls over roughly twice a week and needs rebooting.
Congratulations, you just took one of the most reliable appliances in the home and made it grotesquely unreliable.
That's real progress...right there.
Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
*facepalm*
I can't think of anything worse than a bulb that's at the mercy of your WiFi router. My router falls over roughly twice a week and needs rebooting.
Congratulations, you just took one of the most reliable appliances in the home and made it grotesquely unreliable.
That's real progress...right there.
Fix your router?
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Fix your router?
A thousand times this. I have a 20 dollar belkin router on a ups running tomatousb. Uptime, well over a year. Runs fine.
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Routers are generally not repairable - you need to replace it with a decent one.
The problem is that it is hard to know which ones are decent. As the other reply to your post suggests price isn't everything. Neither is brand reputation for the most part these days. Most reviews focus on features - I haven't really seen many that leave the router running for six months under load and tell you if the WiFi stopped working.
I've had several flaky wireless routers over the years, including a Linksys 54G running
Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
> My router falls over roughly twice a week and needs rebooting.
Then it's broken and needs to be replaced.
Cut the guy some slack (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't think of anything worse than a bulb that's at the mercy of your WiFi router. My router falls over roughly twice a week and needs rebooting. Congratulations, you just took one of the most reliable appliances in the home and made it grotesquely unreliable.
I have a set of the Philips Hue bulbs, and just to clear things up, they're not "at the mercy" of my router- sort of.
By default, all the lights are designed to "turn on" when the power is restored to the bulb. It's a full-brightness, slightly-warm light, about as close to an incandescent 60W as it can manage. Right now my lights are "off", but the power's still flowing. They revert to the default state whenever the power is turned off and then back on, meaning even if the router is down you still get "du
Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
While getting into 'smart lightbulbs' is probably going to be a highly personal choice...
It's fairly unlikely that the light (I say light because some are bulbs, some are sockets) itself would be hacked, but rather your router - and although pranksters making your house look haunted would probably get old real quick, and e.g. flicker-induced epilepsy would be pretty bad, you'd probably have other issues at that point.
That makes very little sense.
As does this. Are you suspecting these lightbulbs of serving up Linux torrents 24/7?
I'd have to ask at what point you removed the switch. There's nothing preventing you from having a switch, and even a dimmer (depending on bulb being okay with it), in addition to the 'smart' application.
Maybe they want their smartphone to slowly increasing lighting levels based on the time of day. Perhaps they want the light to come on automatically when they enter a room (having the smartphone on them). They may want mood lighting control outside of the expensive brand names and better than the $15 ebay solution.
You could probably waste a few minutes searching the web for what people do with these and find dozens of applications.
Just because you and I don't find them all that appealing (hey, I have the $15 ebay solutions.. they work well enough for what I want out of RGB lights), doesn't mean your mind need boggle.
My main complaints with these are that they're almost exclusively bulbs which are going to be expensive to replace. I'd prefer them to be sockets. Unfortunately this would require a new standard in order to deal with RGB (and beyond) bulbs - and more likely than not, this would be proprietary solutions at first; why make a simple set of connector rings when you can use a serial interface with a proprietary encoding so that only your bulbs work with your sockets, right?
Similarly, they all disagree on what wireless standard to use - even if they use the same wireless standard, the actual protocols or specifics of implementation may differ.
I'll wait for some level of standardization, let the early adopters deal with the growing pains, and enjoy the cheapo ebay things for now. If I really wanted them to be 'smart' right now, I'd throw an Arduino or something at the problem.
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There's nothing preventing you from having a switch, and even a dimmer (depending on bulb being okay with it), in addition to the 'smart' application.
Yes there is. Unless the "switch" has been replaced with something smarter, or the bulb has a second source of electric power, turning the ligth off at the switch means you cannot turn it back on again wirelessly.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching [wikipedia.org]
No different from two or more switches controlling one socket.
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That doesn't mean you didn't just combine them - just that one setting makes the smart portion exclusive.
Specifically, the use case...
Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Funny)
Wake up and want to piss at night, fumble for your phone or hit a switch?
That problem is easily solved. You just buy old iPhones, keep the app running, and mount them permanently with a power supply onto your wall. This way you've got a convenient way of switching the light on and off from a known location.
Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wireless is just the easiest way of networking them. As for "internet" why not? Once you are on a network, it is only marginally more complicated for internet control on top of the already implemented intranet control.
Programmable lighting in general is great stuff. Especially for RGB bulbs. If the risk of hacking was so over-whelming, we wouldn't put anything on the net at all. You've assumed the worst-case scenario is the baseline scenario, and that isn't a particularly useful way to do risk evaluati
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What we need is a system whereby simple consumer products can made "smart ready". Clearly every light bulb does not need to be on the internet, at least at present; it's a waste of bandwidth and merely another source of interference for existing wifi networks. A better place to start might be smart sockets that use existing wiring to network the house.. That would be modular allowing homeowners only to change the sockets that they really need. It would also avoid the boondoggle of expensive whole house
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Clearly every light bulb does not need to be on the internet, at least at present; it's a waste of bandwidth and merely another source of interference for existing wifi networks.
Your premise is silly. It isn't like these bulbs are chattering away - other than the occasional "I'm here" broadcast packet like once a minute or so they won't be generating any traffic unless explicitly polled.
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It isn't like these bulbs are chattering away - other than the occasional "I'm here" broadcast packet like once a minute or so
If you are to presume that light bulbs are to be "smart", then surely everything in the home will eventually be "smart" too. If everything each transmits one packet per minute, that turns out to be hundreds of packets per minute in total.
If I ever build my own home then this wont be much of a problem because all 4 walls of every room will have an RJ45 jack that runs to one of the front corners of the structure.
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If everything each transmits one packet per minute, that turns out to be hundreds of packets per minute in total.
It appears that you lack a sense of scale here.
At a conservative throughput of 20mbps, you've got enough bandwidth to do over 2000 1K packets per SECOND. A couple of hundred packets per minute is so small as to barely even register.
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Ah your thinking like an engineer and not a consumer.
You don't get smart sockets until you get a device that can be put into smart sockets. You build wireless bulbs today. You build wireless switches today. in a couple of years you introduce a low bandwidth intent over powerline for light bulbs. That way you can renovate and build new your home with such things already in place and know they work.
I don't know about you but the average person doesn't rip their walls down every 10 years to upgrade the wiri
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You've overlooked the real driver for these.
Consider: Utilities around the world have made a massive push for "smart" meters, despite massive customer resistance. They can spend billions deploying these easily hackable pieces of crap, yet can't upgrade their infrastructure to properly handle truly distributed generation. Now that you have a smartmeter, they offer discounts if you install major appliances the meter can c
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Re:Yeah, let's do that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Admittedly not a lot of people want this but .... We have a place out in the forest... Sometimes when we arrive, it's late at night and it's _dark_ out there... I mean, if it's overcast and the middle of the winter, you can't see _anything_... So we have a yard light that I control remotely via crappy unreliable X-10.. The house is already internet connected via cellphone so I have various scripts on my webserver to let me control things like the thermostat and the X10 yard light. yeah; you could keep the car headlights on until you can get up to the door, unlock it, and turn the lights on.. The remotely controllable yard light also works well in conjunction with the security camera.. Infrared mode doesn't work all that well.
No, not life changing but a small matter of convenience.
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Why so expensive in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:5, Interesting)
In the UK, normal LED bulbs designed as plug-in replacements for incandescent and CLF bulbs typically cost about £13. The Philips Hue bulb, which can change colour with a remote control costs about £50.
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm in the US and I just got a bunch of LED bulbs from Costco for $5 each. Not the color changing ones though.
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Germany, they cost 10€-20€: http://www.amazon.de/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85Z%C3%95%C3%91&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=farbwechsel+birne&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Afarbwechsel+birne [amazon.de]
I personally like the volleyball sized ones: http://www.amazon.de/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85Z%C3%95%C3%91&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=farbwechsel+kugel&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Afarbwechsel+kugel [amazon.de]
They are great for nights outside on the balcony with the laptop and a cigar. I also have one that is waterproof for the pool. I find them in the junk bins in discount supermarkets.
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You can get normal LED bulbs for $30 or less here
Well I was down in florida back oh two months ago, and I didn't see them priced under $45/pop. Up here in Canadaland, they're running anywhere between $38-72 a pop just as standard replacements. I don't like CFL's, the odd LED bulb looks okay, but incandescent are still the big winner up here, especially in the winter. Probably shouldn't get started on the brilliance of switching to LED lighting for street lamps either, especially when you have any type of moderate snowfall they start getting covered up.
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:4, Informative)
Down here in Ohio, I've also seen incandescent stop lights clogged with snow.
*shrug*
It depends on the snow and the wind and the temperature and the duty-cycle of that particular light bulb.
Meanwhile, contrary to what everyone seems to assume: LEDs can get pretty toasty. This is why pre-packaged bulbs and fixtures tend to be mostly heatsink.
IIRC, they're only still about 40% efficient. This is more than an order of magnitude better than an incandescent, but it still means that substantial heat can be generated with use.
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
Two reasons for the heatsink. Firstly, they can get pretty toasty, yes. Secondly, high temperatures greatly shorten the lifespan of a LED. Incandescents or CFLs can take the heat, LEDs can't, so even if the heat dissipated isn't that great they still need large heatsinks.
Re:Why so expensive in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought mine for outdoor illumination, but after examining them, it appears they are very poorly sealed against moisture. Not the LED, rather its the inverter electronics that appears quite vulnerable to condensation which would be expected in an outdoor application, much like you would expect same in a bathroom application.
I have been looking at those 10-watt LED chip arrays from China, which look like they would survive outdoors as long as I ran them substantially below their rated power due to not having them heat sunk very well. They still need a driver, but in this case, I will put up with the inefficiency of using a ballast resistor in order to get the reliability and robustness against moisture that I do not believe I can get from a buck ( switching ) converter.in a wet environment.
I definitely wanted the outside lighting to run on 12 volts ( DC, full wave rectified, minimal filtering for voltage spikes that would destroy the LED ), I considered the 12 volt 20 watt MR16 halogens unsuitable because their current draw demanded heavy expensive wire, I wanted to run my lights with repurposed CAT5 cable ( which I have lots of) snaked in old garden hose as a direct burial conduit. Obviously, the ends are exposed to water, kids and pets, so line voltage is definitely out. I can get 10 ohm 25 watt ( 1 volt per 100 mA ) ballast resistors pretty cheap, and run them way under rating so they barely run warm. They are well sealed, so if they get wet, no big deal.
You may have seen a lot of indicator type LED's and small flashlights and think these things are the ideal cold light source. When I played with higher powered LED's ( 1 watt and up ), I was quite dismayed with how much heat I was going to have to deal with. Incandescents make even more heat, but the heat does not destruct the lamp like heat will shorten the lifetime of a LED.
I have several UltraFire WF-502B flashlights I bought so I could re-use the lithium 18650 style cells I recovered from "spent" power tool and laptop battery packs. I was doing some research on how to build charge equalizers with the cells and later fell in love with the lithium cell technology. These are quite nice high powered flashlights which deliver an unusual amount of light. The flashlights are made from machined aluminum, and they are the first flashlight I have ever had that ran noticeably warm after it has been turned on for a few minutes. They have about a 5 watt LED in them, on a massive block of aluminum heat sunk to the aluminum body of the flashlight. Yes, a beautiful design, and it also illustrates well that high power LED's will heat up.
I know our Government is doing all they can do to ram Fluorescent and LED technology down our collective throats. It is still my firm belief that those technologies are downright dangerous in the bathroom, where condensation wets the innards of the thing, then when you turn it on, ka-blooie! By their construction, incandescent bulbs are extremely resistant to condensation ( and if they are on, no condensation will happen because of the heat ).
Yes, there are some good bulbs out there. There is also a lot of junk. I do not want to diss the new stuff, but in my book, its too early to retire the legacy incandescent.
I have seen the color changing ones where one can custom mix red, green, blue, white LED outputs to make almost any desired hue, and they have their application. I do not know if I really want it all that bad, but maybe it would be good for things like mood lighting. I know I highly prefer my light around 2700K, ( quite yellowish ), but others may want the higher temperature 6000K ( downright cold bluish ) light.
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Re:"Streetlights" covered up. (Score:2)
Poster was talking about traffic signal lights and they can get covered by wind-driven snow.
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You're not missing anything, it's a design problem. The light has a round shield around it, mostly to cut glare. The shield generally has a slot in the bottom, but snow sticks to snow, so snow can easily fill the gap. It's a crap design. Instead, the shield should be square regardless of the shape of the light, the entire bottom of the square should be open, and the light should slope back from top to bottom so that each light's shield is effectively tucked back from the one before it. This would cost sligh
Learn to Shop (Score:3)
Home Depot has them for under $10 now.
In Florida.
Ugh, why would you link to a slideshow? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV5V-dQW8CI [youtube.com]
It's not an awful idea to use a light socket as a standardized power source for more interesting things, but we can do better than some remote controlled colored lights. (Which is what I assume the article was about, I'm never going to know for sure.)
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The light socket was a standardised power source, for a time. The first electric appliance to make it into the home was the electric light - and no others were anticipated, so there were no sockets. This meant that for a time the light bulb socket was the only available source of electricity for appliances in many homes, and became a de facto standard. If you look at many early appliances, such as the first electric vacuum cleaners and toasters, their power cords terminate in an Edison screw* connector to f
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That's quite cool, I didn't know that. It reminds me of how the cigarette lighter is a de facto power source for the car - are people wanting to change this?
In answer to you question, Tesla?
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Tesla?
X10 (Score:5, Informative)
X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10!
"Home control" has been around since the 1990s. It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads [geek.com] for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.
Then there was Echelon LonWorks. [echelon.com] This was a technically better system than X10 (which was mostly one-way), and it's widely used in commercial buildings. It has really good noise immunity, which has resulted in it being used to control auxiliary systems (lights, HVAC, destination signs, etc.) in subway trains. As a home control system, which was the original plan, it went nowhere.
There's no problem doing this, and plenty of products are available. Remote off/on control of home lights and appliances just isn't that useful.
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X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10! X10!
"Home control" has been around since the 1990s. It was once promoted with some really annoying blinking pop-up ads [geek.com] for the X10 wireless control system. Around 2001, X10 was the fourth most popular property on the web. You can still buy X10 gear. It works fine. Nobody cares.
X10 has a few problems that come to mind:
1. It's *really* slow. The protocol sends 1 bit per zero-crossing event, which gives you a grand total of 100bps. You may not think you need much bandwidth for lighting control, but with such a slow data rate, doing things like "turn devices A, B and C on at the same time" become noticably "turn device A on, then B, then C".
2. It's really expensive - Not too bad if you just want one or 2 controllable devices, but replacing every light switch/socket in your house w
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X10 is a REALLY old protocol. Which happens to be still around and still quite popular, but newer technologies such as z-wave or zigbee are probably taking over. And there are modules available which can be built-in, so your house looks just as nicely designed as any other - but smarter.
Yes, but the post I was replying to was specifically talking about X10.
That said, the zigbee, etc. devices seem to be similarly priced as X10 stuff and still not especially widely available.
You find X10 expensive? Compared to the 50 dollar a piece LED bulbs we're talking about here? Look again then.
No, I wasn't comparing it to a $50 LED bulb. I was saying that X10 is too expensive for all but the most dedicated geek to use... the same happens to apply to pretty much *all* the home automation technologies, which is why you haven't seen home automation take off. And frankly there's no especially good reason for it
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The Philips Hue uses zigbee. Just has a bluetooth to zigbee interface. Great thing is you can add it to your existing Zigbee mesh.
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I may not understand the context of your comment, but the Phillips Hue bridge does not use bluetooth and zigbee is not bluetooth. Let me know how much of a whoosh I deserve.
Re:X10 (Score:4, Insightful)
Remote off/on control of home lights and appliances just isn't that useful.
Yeah it is... it's extremely useful; when combined with programming capabilities, it can save electricity, reduce human effort, and improve security.
However, while it's useful... it's usually not useful enough to justify the price that manufacturers charge for it, and the total cost of refitting existing buildings and appliances with remote control features
The automation people need is available through alternative methods that don't require remote control; timer on the coffee pot; outdoor lights with built-in day-night/motion sensor (instead of remote controller using the system time).
When the technology is as cheap as the extra cost you pay for a coffee pot to get the timer feature; when the technology is as cheap as the extra percentage cost you pay for your car to get the "cruise control" feature or the "radio feature".... when the technology is as easy to use as those, and is as inexpensive to get setup and up and running as those;
Then the technology will start to be adopted. Get it down to $5 - $10 per lightbulb, and if it's reliable and easy to use, it will become ubiquitous.
It provides a benefit.... that benefit is just worth less than $200 for a bridge to run it plus the ~$300 or so in terms of cost for additional building surge protection (to prevent all the components getting fried next time there's a power storm), plus $50 per switched light, plus $50 per controller, plus probably ~$70 per circuit average, to get the electrician installation of the required components,; amounting to probably ~$4000+ for true whole-home remote control of just the lights
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Your figures are a bit high. The hue is $199 for three bulbs plus bridge, $60 for each extra bulb thereafter. Each bridge can control 50 bulbs, enough for most houses. You don't need an electrician.
It's not cheap, sadly :-( but less than you suggested.
I've made a disco lighting system for my kitchen for 'only' a few hundred, it's been fun. I'm not sure I'd do the whole house though.
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Thanks to those ads back in the day X10 made it onto my "never ever buy" list. Whenever I hear about X10 (even now) those ads are the first thing that jump into my mind, and I suddenly become highly disinterested in purchasing.
-- Pete.
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X10 does sort of work, but I have a _lot_ of X10 stuff, almost all of it sitting in a closet... Despite what you might think, range is a problem... Plus there's bridging across your two 120VAC sides, limited unit numbers, and bi-directional doesn't work all that well. I inherited all this X-10 stuff including a thermostat, water sensors, motion sensors, handheld remotes, key fobs, repeaters, bridges, filters, telephone voice interface, lamp modules, appliance modules, socket modules, and best of all, an LC
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X10 is shit. It's ALL one-way (X10 Pro is two-way... I've never seen it advertised, let alone sold) and it also doesn't work worth a shit. If you want to turn something on you'd better turn it on at least twice.
There's no problem doing this, and plenty of products are available. Remote off/on control of home lights and appliances just isn't that useful.
It's useful, but it's not as useful as it is expensive.
inexpensive leds with nice color balance (Score:2, Interesting)
Right after the holidays there are loads of xmas strings of lamps.
The color balance can range from nice to awful.
A small string can be wound around a foil covered cardboard tube with a lamp adapter at the end.
The whole thing only draws a few watts.
How long will it last (Score:4, Insightful)
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Where you get the bullshit idea that "you need quite a few of them just to light one room" is anybody's guess.
They probably get it from reality. You can rarely sufficiently light a full room with a single incandescent. LED lamps which aren't directional are lossy and wasteful. GE has a design for incandescents which are twice as efficient as normal, I'd rather use them. Every LED lamp which isn't fifty bucks that I've seen has agonizing flicker, as well. They give me headaches just like CFLs.
Are standard bulbs/sockets really enough? (Score:2)
This would be great if it wasn't for the fact that during the last decade(s) people have been fitting multi-socket halogen fixtures instead of single bulb standard socket fixtures in their homes. I'd definitely love having an app-controlled lighting system, but it would have to be much more flexible than just a bulb or single socket solution. For light fixtures with several low power halogen lights I'd have to hide the control unit somewhere before the power is split to the individual halogens, i.e. somewh
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dmx512 (Score:3)
Switch King? (Score:2)
Security (Score:2)
If these lights or their controllers are publicly adressable on the Internet, they will be hacked. Fortunately the tech is still in its infancy and the people who install these things probably know how to maintain and update them. The damage that a hacked light or a central heater can do mostly amounts to an annoyance and increased power use, assuming that it has proper hardware protections and manual overrides.
Another safety issue is if burglars are armed with RF jammers; they could prevent the house owne
certain conditions (Score:3)
I'll pay $50 for a light bulb, but only if it's manufactured locally by union workers. And it better last a long time, not like these "5 year" fluorescent bulbs that I'm replacing every year.
Fortunately, the fluorescent have gotten really cheap.
Soon you will add it into your home sale price (Score:3)
These bulbs are so expensive that soon you will either remove them all when you move or you will add them into the sale price of your home. It could easily reach a thousand dollars if every bulb were replaced.
From the author (Score:2)
$50 Today (Score:2)
Less tomorrow.
It wasn't that long ago that dumb LED bulbs cost about $50 apiece. I just replaced a couple of PAR 30 floodlight bulbs with LED units (dimmable). Cost: $12 each.
The article [cepro.com] raises some interesting issues. It's probably better to install smart switches and plugs than smart LED bulbs. Better yet, a smart switch that interrogates the bulb (or other fixture) for capabilities. If it sees an incandescent lamp, it just dims. If the bulb replies with an RGB capability, the switch forwards it the app
smart bulbs seem pointless for the masses (Score:2)
most people don't want needless complexity in having a room light they can turn off or on. a dimmer switch is as complicated as it need get. the idea that I would need IT infrastructure to control lights is silly. sure, farting around with X10 can be fun, but slashdotters are hobbyist geeks and not joe average.
Not so long lasting (Score:2)
"I like the idea of controllable, long-lasting light bulbs..."
Unfortunately these LED bulbs are not so long lasting. They make big claims but in actual use I find that there are many failures. The new bulbs are certainly better than five years ago but they still have a dismal failure rate. This is poor performance on the promise.
Content-free article (Score:2)
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Not sure about the quality, but I think the price of the Phillips Hue is just insanely high.
That is because Philips is a top brand. We (used to) deal a lot with fluorescent tube lighting at work, and Philips always was the brand of choice, because of the long lifespan, high energy efficiency, and good color reproduction (high CRI value). But, being a top brand, they also have far higher margins.
Whether the extra quality is worth the double or triple price, is a personal decision.
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Most, if not all, will have some kind of API.
Request the guy/gal behind f.lux to write a similar tool for your lights (might need to incentivize the person).