From an efficiency/sustainability point of view, I have a basic discomfort with the idea of throwing away all the wifi/controller stuff each time you need a new bulb. I know LEDs don't run out very fast, but they do run out. This has cost implications too.
What about a setup where there are two levels of screw: the LED bulb screws into a fixture with the wifi stuff inside, which then screws into the light fixture? Then when the bulb goes out, you can just unscrew the LEDs without having to throw away all the other components.
Maybe there's something I'm missing though; I am by no means knowledgable about electronics.
It's funny, I had the exact opposite worry. With a rated life of 25 years, the WiFi components are likely to become obsolete long before the bulb itself quits. If I buy one of these, am I going to end up maintaining an obsolete WiFi network in the 2030s just to run my household lights?
Given how long most wifi stuff I've seen lasts, and the fact that the bulbs are rated for 25 years, I'm more worried about the wifi components failing and bulbs becoming useless, of the software becoming obsolete and not being able to run on newer devices.
From an efficiency point of view, what about all of these bulbs which will now be drawing power 24/7 for the wifi components, along with everything else in the house that has a standby function?
I'd be generally more worried about the power supply components. There's a tiny switchmode supply in there, which means capacitors. Which would be my main concern for early failures, I'd think far earlier than the LED under normal conditions.
Hopefully they'll be able to arrange good quality caps for manufacturing, even better if the whole unit can be opened up and serviced. Although it's questionable whether 99.5% of the market would ever try and fix it.
No, I agree. This idea is braindead because it's much more effective to focus on a device you plug in between the outlet in your wall and the devices you want to control power to. A standard already exists for half the project which is called x10.
Only one master bulb has a full WiFi setup, which consumes 2-3W. The rest of the bulbs communicate with the master using an 802.15.4 mesh network (which is very very energy efficient).
" the LED bulb screws into a fixture with the wifi stuff inside"
I would also think that the electronics could be small enough to simply be an insert between one of the conductors and the bulb. There are, for example, inserts (size of a coin iirc) that simply can flash a bulb when seated in between the screwbase and the bulb.
I like the idea of "f.lux for my house". Might improve my sleeping. This part of the project is potentially life-altering.
Lots of people in the comments are getting hung up on the "control your lights over wifi" aspect of this project, which is far less interesting. INSTEON is (AFAIK) the current best solution for home automation, and already does this pretty well: http://www.insteon.net/
It's backwards compatible with X10, uses both powerline and RF to send control signals, and each INSTEON device also functions as a repeater, so you're far less likely to run into poor signal issues that plagued X10.
The bulb featured there is the most reasonable retrofit I have seen. Too bad that hundreds of dollars of bulbs and controller don't make much sense for small places.
I wonder how much they have looked at sticking the electronics into switches that would fit inside of normal lamps (probably without the dimmer) or chips for televisions (the $30 LED bulb sort of suggests that they are charging plenty for a simple controllable outlet, at $45).
Seriously, color changing? Dimming? Make a simple natural light bulb, a smartphone app and a wifi wall switch. Latter is far far more important than an ability to drown my kitchen in a shade of green. Keep it useful, damn it. Not a single home automation company gets this. Usability is a key to adoption.
For a good portion of the video, I was thinking the same exact thing. I can't see the average person either needing or even /wanting/ most of those features. From a work perspective, I want to turn my lights on. And I want to turn them off. That's it.
I think the part of the video that really demonstrated where money will be made was when he spent 5 seconds saying "Lifx has commercial applications as well." Now there I can see all these features being useful. (But I suppose tailoring a Kickstarter video towards restaurant/club/bar owners wouldn't net as much capital. :P)
I agree on the featurebloat. And the video is to long imo. Make your sale and get out of dodge.
In any case this product, while cool, reminds me a little of what Steve Blank calls a "novelty" effect (I was at SM with Steve at the time of that product).
The home automation market has been an utter disaster for decades. I hoped the "green" movement would nudge it mainstream. Not yet, and Google even killed off their home electricity monitoring projects.
No color change capability and requires some other stuff as part of the system, but once you start turning on lightbulbs you quickly realize you need relays and sensors to control other things, too. So then you want a "system." And the systems currently suck.
The stuff that gets pitched to consumers for self install is pretty terrible.
When I was in high school I used to work as an electrician for a security/fire/cctv/home automation company. I remember doing a brand new summer house for a CEO of some large corp in roughly 1999-2000 time frame. Even then everything in the house was controlled via low volage relay. Outlets, lights, dimmers, curtains, everything. Each room had a iPad like touch panel on the wall that controlled the entire thing.
There are actually some really good systems out there, they just require that you considered it when you built the house to wire for it ahead of time or go through a costly retrofit. Also the 'best' systems were not that simple to setup. They weren't designed for the user to install so the configuration would often involve punching hexadecimal codes into a controller down in the basement to get the initial setup correct.
Let's change it (company name in my profile). And I'm most disappointed that Google just "disappeared" Android@Home, which is exactly what this Kickstarter seems to be pitching.
I like it. Not that I want my entire house to be purple and green but they mentioned something about changing the light color when receiving a notification. I'm thinking it would be cool to have the light on my desk turn to red when Pingdom reports one of my websites offline. Or to have the lights flash red when my security cameras report motion.
The second thing I would do with this is hook up a voice recognition gadget, and program the system to turn every bulb red when it heard me say "Red alert."
@title: Why does it explicitely mention the iPhone alone... like it was the only important gadget.. (yes the page says iPhone and Android). "from your smartphone" would have been better
You guys need to expose a simple API so that I can program a home server to control many lights. Navigating a different screen for each light in my house would be a pain. You're essentially recreating part of the X10 ecosystem with wifi. At this point you should just buy a bunch if x10 and reimplent the features. They've had nearly 30 years to explore how people use this stuff.
If you had a few of these in your house a an iPhone camera app could be made that controls the lights so that you could compose the shot and the lighting. It could even briefly brighten the lights like a flash setup for just the duration of the exposure. That way the lighting needed for the moment of the shot needn't interfere with the ambience of the room.
Interesting things could be done by having lighting shifts programmed to change during video shots, too.
nice idea, but unfortunately I do not see this becoming 'big' for a couple of reasons. For instance, even though one can buy LEDs advertised as having a 'warm' colour, the light produced is still rather harsh compared to halogen for instance. Most people do not want an entire house, or even a single room, lighted purely by LEDs. Same goes for the colour: on paper it's nice to read that colour can set a certain mood and such, but is there really any practical use? Who wants to sit in a blue/green/red room anyway? Another factor is that it seems to be a small subset of an actual existing but practical system: current domotica systems can be controlled by your smartphone, by a pc, over the internet, you name it. And there are already dozens of them.
This would be great for connecting up to a CI server or monitoring system. If a build breaks, flash red or maybe if the site goes down go to solid red.
For instance, you can use yellow for "warning/important" level and red for "critical" level, and lights-only for staging environment and light & sound alarm for production environment, for instance. Pretty expensive, though.
You don't want to work in a room with a flashing light.
Also, there are tons of colored LEDs that integrate with CI systems already. And it's something you can whip up with an ATtiny or similar in about 10 minutes anyway. (Hint, your VGA port has an I2C pin on it.)
I like the project. It's neat. Also neat is watching the video and seeing hundreds of dollars pour into the Kickstarter project.
I guess the WiFi/logic controller is on-board each individual bulb? Then you would pair(?) the bulbs to the app?
If that's the case, I wonder what they're doing about security - since most anyone skilled would be able to hack different homes with different light setups.
Hopefully this doesn't get held up by patent trolls...
I was wondering about the security as well. I would imagine it would make it easier for thieves to rob a house where they could turn off all the lights. Or turn on the lights and see if there is any reaction (to see if anyone is home).
This is one of those times where I wonder what these guys think Phillips, GE, and others are spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars on LED lighting solutions are doing. In some industries you can say "Oh they just don't get it" but lighting is so fashion driven and so fundamental to everything we do these entrenched players don't miss out on much.
$70 for ONE bulb, so that's $280 for 4 in one room, You could hack an LED bulb together to cheap using cables instead of Wifi, A better future proof idea would be to have a very very customizable app that you sell, An app that let's you interface with computer controlled Lights
Is it just me or is Kickstarter addicting? It seems like every week there is some new cool project posted and I can't help but back it. If something like this were at Walmart I probably wouldn't give it a second thought, but on Kickstarter I've already in for 2.
Very cool. 6 Watts, wifi controlled, colors and dimming, and plugs into a standard lightbulb socket. Mayhaps, the transformation from 110VAC adds to the complexity and possibly power consumption. Power over ethernet might be a better option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet
We're using 12V with many white LEDs that consume .1 Watts powered entirely from the sun. The tiny 12V sockets have intially caused some problems because there are two prongs on the base and the base, and there appear to be different ways of wiring this.
I'd find this potentially interesting if I had any confidence that it wouldn't burn out in a few months like every other "lasts for years" bulb I've tried.
Many CFL bulbs are junk. Their "years" claim assumes they are only used for brief periods each day, and even at that I doubt they can reach their warrantee period. That doesn't matter though, because you will be unable to find any mechanism for contacting the manufacturer about the warrantee. I assume they have zero claims.
LED bulbs are different. Heat is a killer. You might be burning them up in an enclosed or even partially enclosed fixture.
Because I enjoy all the radio signal pollution and I want more.
Y won't they make this, but in the light bulb use the lan over power, then plug a lan over power adapter in where your router is. Connect it to the router, and you can then control it via your network (sorta like a media box). But then you have the problem that every lightbulb is a "computer" on the power network and I don't know how that would work.
I'm guessing because there are already products that using LAN over powerline.
From Insteon website [emphasis mine]:
>"The INSTEON LED Bulb features simple setup, intuitive control and easy linking to any INSTEON controller, such as a handheld remote. When paired with the free INSTEON app, the SmartLinc Hub turns an iOS/Android smartphone or tablet into a fully functioning remote control of the bulb or an entire INSTEON network. The bulb is fully dimmable and can be added to any number of scenes to create custom lighting at the touch of a button.
The INSTEON LED Bulb contains INSTEON’s patented dual-band communication technology, the most reliable, efficient communication system available. Just like other INSTEON devices, the bulb acts as a network signal repeater and sends signals over both radio frequencies (RF) and a home’s existing wires (powerline).
The INSTEON LED Bulb retails for $29.99. For more information or to watch a demonstration video, visit www.insteon.com/bulb." //
[+] [-] ForrestN|13 years ago|reply
What about a setup where there are two levels of screw: the LED bulb screws into a fixture with the wifi stuff inside, which then screws into the light fixture? Then when the bulb goes out, you can just unscrew the LEDs without having to throw away all the other components.
Maybe there's something I'm missing though; I am by no means knowledgable about electronics.
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BCM43|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zarify|13 years ago|reply
Just get LED bulbs and use the off switch.
[+] [-] bluthru|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angusgr|13 years ago|reply
Hopefully they'll be able to arrange good quality caps for manufacturing, even better if the whole unit can be opened up and serviced. Although it's questionable whether 99.5% of the market would ever try and fix it.
[+] [-] INTPenis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianlevesque|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
I would also think that the electronics could be small enough to simply be an insert between one of the conductors and the bulb. There are, for example, inserts (size of a coin iirc) that simply can flash a bulb when seated in between the screwbase and the bulb.
[+] [-] ewang1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dakrisht|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhousel|13 years ago|reply
Lots of people in the comments are getting hung up on the "control your lights over wifi" aspect of this project, which is far less interesting. INSTEON is (AFAIK) the current best solution for home automation, and already does this pretty well: http://www.insteon.net/
It's backwards compatible with X10, uses both powerline and RF to send control signals, and each INSTEON device also functions as a repeater, so you're far less likely to run into poor signal issues that plagued X10.
[+] [-] maxerickson|13 years ago|reply
I wonder how much they have looked at sticking the electronics into switches that would fit inside of normal lamps (probably without the dimmer) or chips for televisions (the $30 LED bulb sort of suggests that they are charging plenty for a simple controllable outlet, at $45).
[+] [-] waxjar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|13 years ago|reply
Seriously, color changing? Dimming? Make a simple natural light bulb, a smartphone app and a wifi wall switch. Latter is far far more important than an ability to drown my kitchen in a shade of green. Keep it useful, damn it. Not a single home automation company gets this. Usability is a key to adoption.
[+] [-] sheriff|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.belkin.com/wemo/
[+] [-] dave5104|13 years ago|reply
I think the part of the video that really demonstrated where money will be made was when he spent 5 seconds saying "Lifx has commercial applications as well." Now there I can see all these features being useful. (But I suppose tailoring a Kickstarter video towards restaurant/club/bar owners wouldn't net as much capital. :P)
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
In any case this product, while cool, reminds me a little of what Steve Blank calls a "novelty" effect (I was at SM with Steve at the time of that product).
http://steveblank.com/2009/05/11/supermac-war-story-x-the-vi...
[+] [-] Kiro|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meanguy|13 years ago|reply
Here's a similar product:
http://www.smarthome.com/2672-222/INSTEON-LED-Bulb/p.aspx
No color change capability and requires some other stuff as part of the system, but once you start turning on lightbulbs you quickly realize you need relays and sensors to control other things, too. So then you want a "system." And the systems currently suck.
[+] [-] mbell|13 years ago|reply
The stuff that gets pitched to consumers for self install is pretty terrible.
When I was in high school I used to work as an electrician for a security/fire/cctv/home automation company. I remember doing a brand new summer house for a CEO of some large corp in roughly 1999-2000 time frame. Even then everything in the house was controlled via low volage relay. Outlets, lights, dimmers, curtains, everything. Each room had a iPad like touch panel on the wall that controlled the entire thing.
There are actually some really good systems out there, they just require that you considered it when you built the house to wire for it ahead of time or go through a costly retrofit. Also the 'best' systems were not that simple to setup. They weren't designed for the user to install so the configuration would often involve punching hexadecimal codes into a controller down in the basement to get the initial setup correct.
[+] [-] nitrogen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BryanB55|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomkin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wistar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wistar|13 years ago|reply
Interesting things could be done by having lighting shifts programmed to change during video shots, too.
[+] [-] gkoberger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stinos|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coenhyde|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nandemo|13 years ago|reply
http://www.patlite.com/product/category0002_000000.html
For instance, you can use yellow for "warning/important" level and red for "critical" level, and lights-only for staging environment and light & sound alarm for production environment, for instance. Pretty expensive, though.
[+] [-] jrockway|13 years ago|reply
Also, there are tons of colored LEDs that integrate with CI systems already. And it's something you can whip up with an ATtiny or similar in about 10 minutes anyway. (Hint, your VGA port has an I2C pin on it.)
[+] [-] dakrisht|13 years ago|reply
I guess the WiFi/logic controller is on-board each individual bulb? Then you would pair(?) the bulbs to the app?
If that's the case, I wonder what they're doing about security - since most anyone skilled would be able to hack different homes with different light setups.
Hopefully this doesn't get held up by patent trolls...
[+] [-] netfire|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godsdead|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james33|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmphosis|13 years ago|reply
We're using 12V with many white LEDs that consume .1 Watts powered entirely from the sun. The tiny 12V sockets have intially caused some problems because there are two prongs on the base and the base, and there appear to be different ways of wiring this.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|13 years ago|reply
Many CFL bulbs are junk. Their "years" claim assumes they are only used for brief periods each day, and even at that I doubt they can reach their warrantee period. That doesn't matter though, because you will be unable to find any mechanism for contacting the manufacturer about the warrantee. I assume they have zero claims.
LED bulbs are different. Heat is a killer. You might be burning them up in an enclosed or even partially enclosed fixture.
[+] [-] ScottBurson|13 years ago|reply
As with many things, buying the very cheapest is not the way you're most likely to have a good experience.
[+] [-] Freestyler_3|13 years ago|reply
Y won't they make this, but in the light bulb use the lan over power, then plug a lan over power adapter in where your router is. Connect it to the router, and you can then control it via your network (sorta like a media box). But then you have the problem that every lightbulb is a "computer" on the power network and I don't know how that would work.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|13 years ago|reply
From Insteon website [emphasis mine]:
>"The INSTEON LED Bulb features simple setup, intuitive control and easy linking to any INSTEON controller, such as a handheld remote. When paired with the free INSTEON app, the SmartLinc Hub turns an iOS/Android smartphone or tablet into a fully functioning remote control of the bulb or an entire INSTEON network. The bulb is fully dimmable and can be added to any number of scenes to create custom lighting at the touch of a button.
The INSTEON LED Bulb contains INSTEON’s patented dual-band communication technology, the most reliable, efficient communication system available. Just like other INSTEON devices, the bulb acts as a network signal repeater and sends signals over both radio frequencies (RF) and a home’s existing wires (powerline).
The INSTEON LED Bulb retails for $29.99. For more information or to watch a demonstration video, visit www.insteon.com/bulb." //
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|13 years ago|reply
Unless you're operating some sensitive specialized radio equipment, is it really a problem?
> But then you have the problem that every lightbulb is a "computer" on the power network and I don't know how that would work.
IPv6.