The thing I like most about LEDs isn’t the reduced energy usage or longer life, though those are super nice. My favorite part is now that they’re running cool enough we can add some brains to the light bulbs. Motion sensors, timers, color changing add a lot of convenience and you get it in the same form factor you’re used to.
My favorite part is just space. I put strips up in the corners to light the living room with no extra tables or standing lights, no need for sky lights. Less crap in the way
That’s yet another thing I love about them. I decorated my kids’ rooms with just some LEDs on tape and it looks awesome, and they can change the colors, and it was super cheap and easy.
Sadly, most of those features are bound to some shit app which tracks you and gets hacked every 2 years or so and your personal data stolen. You have to actually search to find non-smart lamps with motion sensor or color changing feature (5 of them to choose from).
Or if you are technically inclined you can buy Zigbee or Z-Wave stuff, get your own dongle for it and run Home Assistant on your home server, and do everything 100% locally and it can still be really “smart”. You can also do anything with it. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
Hopefully Thread/Matter will help with this, which is an initiative to make interoperable smart home … stuff.
Hopefully Thread/Matter will help with this, which is an initiative to make interoperable smart home … stuff.
Yeah, i’ll start with it when it happens. I have self-hosted smart stuff always considered experimental stage (meaning: lots of changing gears) and i’m not the early adopter type if i can avoid it. May be fun for some but it’s tiring to me.
There is nothing experimental about self-hosting Zigbee stuff. It’s an open protocol, so as long as the devices follow it (at least somewhat correctly) you can work with it.
And the actual “hard work” has already been done by others - Zigbee2MQTT, for example, supports over 3000 devices, so the ground work of having device definitions with easy use has already been done. What Matter aims to do is to provide standards for devices so that they all have some minimal basic functionality, expose the same fields in the same way, etc. so you don’t need a hand-maintained library like that. There isn’t even really a reason to be skeptical; considering all this stuff already works well enough, it can only get better.
It can definitely be hard or tiring, but you wouldn’t be an early adopter. It’s like saying that switching to Linux now (or even 15 years ago) would make you an early adopter. It wouldn’t; it already works, plenty people have done it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get better with time or that it’s easy or for everyone.
Yeah, I avoid anything internet connected unless absolutely necessary. However, there’s a ton of LED bulbs with neat conveniences but no internet connectivity.
I absolutely love my RGB smart bulbs. I remember when they first came out with smart lights and you not only needed the right bulb, but the smart bits were in the lamp, so you needed a special lamp too.
Being able to just buy smart bulbs and use them in anything is awesome. The ones I got can even be linked with IFTTT so I can do crazy shit like make the lights in my room react to my games.
The thing I like most about LEDs isn’t the reduced energy usage or longer life, though those are super nice. My favorite part is now that they’re running cool enough we can add some brains to the light bulbs. Motion sensors, timers, color changing add a lot of convenience and you get it in the same form factor you’re used to.
I really enjoy having my lights color temperature change with the time of day. Makes working in the basement a tad more enjoyable.
My favorite part is just space. I put strips up in the corners to light the living room with no extra tables or standing lights, no need for sky lights. Less crap in the way
That’s yet another thing I love about them. I decorated my kids’ rooms with just some LEDs on tape and it looks awesome, and they can change the colors, and it was super cheap and easy.
How do you power them? Just connect to the current lighting wiring?
Most led tape either comes with a small battery pack or just plugs directly into the wall socket
Yep, and you can even trim it with scissors and connect pieces together. It’s pretty neat stuff
Sadly, most of those features are bound to some shit app which tracks you and gets hacked every 2 years or so and your personal data stolen. You have to actually search to find non-smart lamps with motion sensor or color changing feature (5 of them to choose from).
Or if you are technically inclined you can buy Zigbee or Z-Wave stuff, get your own dongle for it and run Home Assistant on your home server, and do everything 100% locally and it can still be really “smart”. You can also do anything with it. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
Hopefully Thread/Matter will help with this, which is an initiative to make interoperable smart home … stuff.
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Yeah, i’ll start with it when it happens. I have self-hosted smart stuff always considered experimental stage (meaning: lots of changing gears) and i’m not the early adopter type if i can avoid it. May be fun for some but it’s tiring to me.
There is nothing experimental about self-hosting Zigbee stuff. It’s an open protocol, so as long as the devices follow it (at least somewhat correctly) you can work with it.
And the actual “hard work” has already been done by others - Zigbee2MQTT, for example, supports over 3000 devices, so the ground work of having device definitions with easy use has already been done. What Matter aims to do is to provide standards for devices so that they all have some minimal basic functionality, expose the same fields in the same way, etc. so you don’t need a hand-maintained library like that. There isn’t even really a reason to be skeptical; considering all this stuff already works well enough, it can only get better.
It can definitely be hard or tiring, but you wouldn’t be an early adopter. It’s like saying that switching to Linux now (or even 15 years ago) would make you an early adopter. It wouldn’t; it already works, plenty people have done it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get better with time or that it’s easy or for everyone.
Yeah, I avoid anything internet connected unless absolutely necessary. However, there’s a ton of LED bulbs with neat conveniences but no internet connectivity.
I absolutely love my RGB smart bulbs. I remember when they first came out with smart lights and you not only needed the right bulb, but the smart bits were in the lamp, so you needed a special lamp too.
Being able to just buy smart bulbs and use them in anything is awesome. The ones I got can even be linked with IFTTT so I can do crazy shit like make the lights in my room react to my games.