Oddbean new post about login | logout Just found out smart bulbs exist. Do people use them? I was looking to buy an orange bulb but coloured bulbs don't seem to exist any more or not as available. 🤔
Yes, bought many of them like 10 years ago for way too much money instead of buying you know what.
You will at first find them fun. Oh they change colors! Then you will hate them. "No, don't flick the light switch, now the bulb reset." Also, your bulbs will need firmware updates. If it's a novelty, go ahead, but don't install it anywhere permanently.
We used to have the hue system about 7 years ago. A roommate got them as a gift, I wired it up to Home Assistant on a secured network. It was neat. What we appreciated most was simply the automation. Lights in different rooms on and off (and certain brightness) at desired times. I even set it up to adjust to weather and sunlight (GPS). I had outdoor lights come on when cameras detected prolonged movement through a closed circuit camera system.
yes, i do- but the apps that come with them are usually shit, so either you have to put up with that or spend time reverse-engineering the protocol and hacking your own interface, whichever u prefer
this
I think everyone has thoroughly put me off. I'll just buy a dumb orange bulb, if they still sell them. Failing that I'll buy an orange plastic bag lol
yeah anything more is probably not worth it if you don't want to do color changes or effects 😀 (and if you do, might as well get some meters of cheapo chinese RGB LED strips and drive them with an arduino/raspberry pi, instead of risk wifi lightbulbs sniffing your network traffic or such lol)
Buy a managed switch and isolate stuff on a separate vlan. Ideal for untrusted devices like chine cameras or other iot devices
I meant chinese.
yea that's a good idea, isolating such devices on a separate network also helps for intercepting traffic, or active measures like TLS stripping, if you want to do protocol reverse engineering tbf i already have that.... i am one of those people that has 4 subnets in a 50m2 apartment... the network topology is more like some kind of Winchester mystery house but if you can you probably want to get bluetooth instead of wifi-controlled ones so the reach is restricted physically, this still leaves the app and its potential spyware to deal with but... 😫
boomer box? they have the time to volunteer & don't give a shit, Cuz, they r cycling out.........it's ffs hilarious!
If it requires a separate app, I won't buy it (except maybe for initial setup, or cloud auth, which unfortunately some devices require). So far, using home assistant as a single point of control works pretty well.
oh home assistant looks kinda neat ! i currently just hacked my own app together (using godot and a websockets backend) to control lights etc, which was fun as a learning project but is also a hassle to maintain 😀
Big Home Assistant fan here! And it's made by a Dutch guy :-) Easiest to run it on a dedicated Linux box somewhere, because it's a bit of a Docker circus.
https://dashy.to is a great dashboard for self hosted stuff.
oh that's neat! > Easiest to run it on a dedicated Linux box somewhere, because it's a bit of a Docker circus. no lack of those... i also have a few of these computers (in-flight entertainment systems) from the etnaviv days, that i wanted to use, at least for the control interface https://media.x0f.org/ac3aa74f10e073357709ba9f7b548fed9867424d44b8352c42aa2d0973410e29.webp https://media.x0f.org/bae948365bbdd6bd8ec5f7891e90941a4a06c72e6cd0218e4e247ba84e1a8688.webp
Then you can get your hands on a zigbee coordinator either to USB or Ethernet and run zigbee2mqtt as service aswell on that computer. Connects easily to Home Assistant. All zigbee smart bulbs i have used works without any hassle. IKEA has many different for a cheap price.
Also I would recommend to integate with influxdb, for persistence of historical data. Then put grafana on top of that and you can add your grafana graphs into home assistant with the external web page card.
