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Smart LED Light Bulb Roundup

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jec6613

Occasional Visitor
A good article, but I do have at least one correction to make: Insteon does support geofencing, but only if you have a Windows Phone (for now). It relies on the mobile OS to provide the triggers, and as a result Cortana's location based alerts can turn on your lights based on ridiculously complicated conditions (for instance: turn on the lights when I arrive at home but only on weekdays after sunset). When Google Now and Siri add location aware alerts that can hand off to their home automation API, then Android and iOS will gain that feature, as well.

For similar reasons, Insteon also supports timers, because your phone's personal assistant supports timers.
 
I did purchase the expensiver version of the Philips Hue kit in order to test ut whether going from cooler to warmer lightning in my house would have a positive effect on my cronical migrenes and cronical headaches.

Sadly it didn't seem to have any effect on my cronical conditions, but I do find the lights to be of high-quality and we do really enjoy our automatic setup with slowly increasing lighting from early morning to bright blue light around the hours we are supposed to wake up, and also having the lights going orange and dim over time throughout the evening etc..


Any downsides? The price... It's crazy expensive for what it is and I would never have made such an investment if it wasn't due to my cronical migrenes and my doctors recommending me to try it out. We have still only invested in four bulbs, one in the bedroom and three in the living room. We would love to replace more bulbs but it's so darn expensive and they only offer a single connection type.


One thing I did not like was the iOS software we had to use to get everything working as we wanted.. It's been a while since I did it, but there was no automation of any sort. I had to resolve into manually configuring a "alarm" at spesific hours with a spesific mode (colour) and light strength (prosentage) and get it all tweaked and sorted the way I liked it. And since then I haven't touched it at all, all we do now is to use our iOS Notification Center with Philips Hue widget to turn of the lights when we go to bed.


I think our Philips Hue account / app got like 12. differant alarms, and another 12. for the weekend as our waking and sleeping schedule is different than compared to the rest of the week. All in order to get the lights slightly increasing in strength from early morning until wake up hours. Having blueish tint on the lights in the morning, going to white mid-day, yellowish in the early-evening and more orange in the evening and sligthly dimmer during the evening etc..


The geofencing didn't work very well as we have multiple devices with the hue app and it will turn off the lights when I leaved from the morning while my girlfriend was still at home and the other way around.



I guess the app have developed since then, but man what a mess to get everything working as intended.
 
While having smartphone control and scenes or triggered scenarios is great, I would like some sort of accessory physical switch (touch, toggle, or whatever) that I can either hard-wire (for power only, not control of the bulb) in a box or mount relatively flush to the wall to run on battery. When dealing with older homes, often they do not have switched outlets, and always carrying around your smartphone isn't practical.
 
Thanks for a useful roundup. I've been experimenting as well, though not with complete kits like here - I do have the Wink hub, though I find it notoriously unreliable on the Wifi side. I primarily have a SmartThings hub, but I've slowly started moving away from it because I'm not a fan of Samsung's love of promising privacy and failing to deliver repeatedly. While we've not yet fully decided what we'd do if we were building or retrofitting a house, I've settled on mostly dumb bulbs and smart switches. At the end of the day, as nice as it might be to have individual control of bulbs, I still usually walk into a room and tap the wall switch to turn on the lights in the room. Pulling my phone/tablet/watch/something else that may blind me in the darkness out just seemed like an unnecessary step as I'm trying to navigate a dark room. To me, one place where smart bulbs might make sense - though we've not found any that act this way - are bathrooms: dimmer only in the morning when you walk in, and brighter as your eyes adapt. Better yet, I suspect my wife would love to have bulbs that can change from incandescent to daylight hues so she can see how makeup or outfits would look like under various lighting.
 
Better yet, I suspect my wife would love to have bulbs that can change from incandescent to daylight hues so she can see how makeup or outfits would look like under various lighting.
Philips Hue would do that. But $$$$
 
"I launched each application, tested, and then shut down the app. The only product that was still able to control its lights without an internet connection was the Belkin WeMo. All the other products timed out while trying to connect to their gateways through the internet. I then restored the network connection to the AP, and all five apps worked as expected."

Do I understand this correctly? Most of the products require an internet connection for you to be able to control them?
 
Yes, that is correct. That is why I disabled my internet connection to test this feature.

In most of the systems, your control request goes to the manufacturer's backend server which is connected via the Internet to the manufacturer's hub. The hub bridges your Internet connection to whatever technology the manufacturer uses (Zigbee, proprietary, etc.) to communicate with the controlled device.
 
I did purchase the expensiver version of the Philips Hue kit in order to test ut whether going from cooler to warmer lightning in my house would have a positive effect on my cronical migrenes and cronical headaches.

One thing I did not like was the iOS software we had to use to get everything working as we wanted.. It's been a while since I did it, but there was no automation of any sort. I had to resolve into manually configuring a "alarm" at specific hours with a spesific mode (colour) and light strength (prosentage) and get it all tweaked and sorted the way I liked it. And since then I haven't touched it at all, all we do now is to use our iOS Notification Center with Philips Hue widget to turn of the lights when we go to bed.
You might check www.ifttt.com. If This Then That has a lot of "recipes" that work specifically with the hue lights. When I reviewed the product, there weren't any recipes for the Lux bulbs, and my hub couldn't succesfully link with my account. It still doesn't despite my re-enabling UPnP on my router to test.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yes, that is correct. That is why I disabled my internet connection to test this feature.

In most of the systems, your control request goes to the manufacturer's backend server which is connected via the Internet to the manufacturer's hub. The hub bridges your Internet connection to whatever technology the manufacturer uses (Zigbee, proprietary, etc.) to communicate with the controlled device.

That's just crazy. I'm fine with making the home smarter but I generally do NOT want my home appliances connected to the internet unless there is some very good reasons to do so.
 
While having smartphone control and scenes or triggered scenarios is great, I would like some sort of accessory physical switch (touch, toggle, or whatever) that I can either hard-wire (for power only, not control of the bulb) in a box or mount relatively flush to the wall to run on battery. When dealing with older homes, often they do not have switched outlets, and always carrying around your smartphone isn't practical.
Insteon does this - they have switches that can be controlled, and outlets, and you can pair them. In fact, a system can exist just fine without any smartphone control at all.

I've set up one where there are remote switches for the garage doors mounted, and where using a switch on the wall also turns on the smart bulbs in addition to the recessed can lights, and dims them all in unison.
 
we need smart devices that have their own LCD panels for control instead of always relying on the smart phone or perhaps routed to an LCD panel that can control multiple devices in a room (a bit star trek like) without the need for being connected to the internet. I can understand that a number of people arent smart enough to port forward their house lights to control them remotely but i would feel horrible if everything i wanted to do had to go through a remote server because its like someone controlling and seeing what you can or cant do.
 
My ex-girlfriend's dad had Control4 systems at all of his houses, even on his boat, and I must say, even though this was 4 years ago, I was very impressed with what it could do. You could use your phone if you wanted to, but he had universal remotes that all looked the same, but could control anything he had setup, since you can buy individual add-on modules for different features. That system was mostly for people where money is no concern. In certain parts of the house, he has touch screens built into the wall, and the system could be programmed with macros to do many things in whatever order you wished by only touching one button.

His system is what got me really interested in home automation, but the only home automation I've invested in were a few Hue bulbs. I read where Control4 recently released a more "affordable" solution with the controller itself starting at $600. One day I hope to be able to do everything that setup did, but right now, unless you're willing to spend a lot of money for a complete system, it's not going to happen.

When shopping for these Hue bulbs, I noticed the huge variety of wireless protocols everyone's device used. Hopefully one day there will be a standard where every device will be able to talk with another. From what I understand, the new Control4 controller will work with everyone's wireless protocol, but I'm assuming this is because they can integrate every wireless protocol into their controller.

The Hue bulbs work off Zigbee, and I bought some WeMo Lightify LED strips to use for my under cabinet lighting because the bulbs and the fixtures currently there go out frequently and last week one bulb got so hot it exploded. The Lightify strips are supposed to be able to work off the Zigbee wireless spectrum, but I can't connect them to the Philips Hub to control them off the same system. The only reason I didn't buy the Philips Hue LED strips is because they cost $99 for 2 feet. You can cut them to size like the standard LED strips that have been around for a while, but once you cut them, the cut piece becomes unusable. Since I have 4 different areas under my cabinets that need lighting, I would be spending $400 and probably cutting half of them to size.

I bought some LED strips for my PC, and they only cost $15 or so for 5 meters. I also have an Aqua Computer Farbwerk Bluetooth controller, which can control 4 sets of LED strips, and it only cost my $30-$40. Supposedly, this Aqua Computer Farbwerk controller can be used as a standalone device outside of a computer, so I might try rigging something up, but it still won't integrate with my Hue products.

You mentioned it being a pain to have to continuously use your phone to control the Hue bulbs, but you don't need to do this anymore. I bought a dimmer, which sits in a base and can be stuck to the wall wherever you want it. The dimmer controller can be removed, or left in the base (which looks like a Lutron switch) but it's not wired to anything. You can program the dimmer to work with as few or as many lights you want, it has an on button, an off button, and of course the dimmer. This way you can operate the lights without your phone. I also bought a Philips Tap Switch, which I like better. It's round, it has 3 buttons on it, and it too sticks to the wall but can also be removed from the base. It doesn't require any batteries because it works off of Kinetic energy. Each button can be programmed to a scene, either one already available from Philips or you can create your own. Each button can be programmed to turn on however many bulbs you wish along with whatever color you wish. You can program one button to turn on the lights (however many you want, whatever colors you want, and whatever brightness you want), and with a second press, it turns them all off. You can program each button to operate all the lights in the house or you can program it where each button turns on/off lights in different areas of the house or all of them together. So if you want all the lights to turn on to a certain color and to a certain brightness, you can do that. If you want all the lights to turn on to a different color and a different brightness, you can do that with one of the other buttons, so depending on what time of the day it is, you can press a different button to turn on/off whatever lights in the house that you want. Both of these devices, the dimmer and the tap switch eliminate the need to use your phone everytime you want to turn them on/off. You can now do the same with voice commands, whether you have an Apple phone or an Android phone. The Hue app itself is very basic, and I hardly ever use it. Anyone can download the SDK from the Philips website and create any application they want to control the lights, have them blink or change colors briefly if you receive an email, text, etc or have them do the same based on the temperature outside or if it's going to rain. The apps people are creating are plentiful, but I see more made for Apple devices than Android.

Sorry for the long post, but I bought my Hue lights last week and have looked extensively into their functionality, which I'm sure has probably changed quite a bit since your post. I just wanted to let you know that many, many options are now available which may not have been available a year ago. I also bought some nest thermostats, which I haven't hooked up yet, but once everything is setup, I'll even be able to control everything with my Logitech Harmony remote. If one day I can afford to update to a Control4 system, everything I have can be operated from this remote. These devices weren't cheap, but I figured they would pay for themselves in energy savings, especially when I install motion detectors in my daughter's rooms so the lights will cut off automatically since for some reason they don't know how to do it.

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