Because it's so cheap, nobody's going to make the effort to translate the documentation into English and put it on the Internet. But on the other hand if you go there and ask in Chinese you can get quite a lot of information.
On the other hand, just translating the documentation of this led lightbulb interface would have taken very little time, and would have probably created a nice app that would appeal to western buyers and increase sales.
Maybe there's an opportunity for some site to make this process happen ?
There's also a lot of stuff at seeedstudio.com or electrodragon.com that is open source too.
Also, this episode describes where China/Shenzen is at right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k
I've bought stuff from seeed studio before. Nice stuff, nice people. Obviously your mileage may vary WRT individual pieces of hardware.
For example connected stuff(either to app or site). Also there's a case to be made for letting people change the embedded software inside their bluetooth headphones, noise cancelling earphones, routers,mp3 players[1], android tv boxes, and any other products with complex software.
[1]There's a custom rom for that called rockbox
mjg59 never fails to disappoint.
[1]: http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-l...
(I've not used it so I couldn't say why)
> In the 60 Hz AC current flow, a bit value of one is represented by a 1 millisecond burst of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (nominally 0°, but within 200 microseconds of the zero crossing point), immediately followed by the absence of a pulse. A zero value is represented by the absence of 120 kHz at the zero crossing point (pulse), immediately followed by the presence of a pulse.
Command sequences are only 2 bytes (16 bits) long, and for certain commands ("all lights on", "all lights off") four of those bits are even ignored. This means it's quite common for electrical noise to be mistaken for signals.
The other problem is increasingly we have more noisy electrical gear on the line, and more equipment that absorbs/filters the actual signals (UPSes, and pretty much any switch-mode power supply in computers, TVs, etc).
I unfortunately put in a bunch of X10 stuff at my parent's cottage many years ago, and it had this problem. Somewhere between every couple days and every few weeks, all the lights would turn on. Sometimes while no one was there, sometimes in the middle of night when you were sleeping :)
We since replaced it with Insteon dual-band, which uses both wireless and powerline, and it's significantly more reliable (and all those problems have disappeared).
In case anyone's interested, we used this stuff because the main floor is basically one big open concept space, and has entrances on all four sides (deck, sunroom, stairs and front door) and the 'smart' switches avoided having to install a stupid amount of 3- and 4-way switches that were originally planned. There's now a keypad by the front door and one in the middle (between kitchen area and sunroom) that can control everything, and a few individual switches by other doors. You can press 'all off' by the front door when leaving and all 6 or 7 circuits in the main area plus the sunroom, hallway, stairs, and foyer turn off.
RF spewing out of the mains wiring is true, but again I've not had any obvious problems due to this. (I'm surprised that they're allowed to be used despite this, however)
edit: Streaming TV over it in that I use it to connect between a MythTV front and back-end, and haven't had any connection or bandwidth issues that I've noticed. It's been pretty rock-solid for me :)
It's really, really hard to beat the user-interface (or security!) of a traditional light switch or dimmer. I'd like to have control without getting up, automate some things, or change the colors, but that all comes at a huge cost.
Probably enough to tick a box though
As a software person who is just getting into electronics (played with a particle photon, just bought the Make: Electronics book & component kit to learn), what are the options when you want to have two pieces of hardware communicate inside a house?
- Bluetooth - limited range?
- Wifi - requires you to join each piece to the network, seems a hassle/expensive for simple electronics.
- Xbee - expensive!
- RF transmitter/receiver - seems cheap, but maybe distance is limited and there may be a lot of noise?
Anything else?
So you can build something like this using a simple PIR sensor + ESP8266.
I built a garage door opening sensor using an ESP8266 (connected to my home wifi) and a magnetic contact switch. I'm also using TelAPI to send me SMS messages every time the garage door is opened.
It is very simple to do, and kind of cheap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg
I'm currently writing this up, but I'm loving the fact that I can integrate it with games, and I want to add some more. Next goal is for my living room's lighting to pulse orange or blue depending on which team scores in Rocket League. If anyone knows how I can hook into the game to get various pieces of info, please let me know.
It's pretty well done, though he also has these magic numbers around that he couldn't quite figure out what they were there for. I used this and hacked an amazon button to control my home lighting and it works great.
All these seems like more argument to standardized IoT.
Even worse, it's above the EU limit which mandates <0.5W (since 2013) [2].
[1] https://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2012/network/3ViegandSes...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_Regulation_No._1275/2008
Affordable for many, yes, but IMO, for a LED lightbulb, that's horrendous. Let's do the math: 0.7W full time is 16,8 Wh a day.
In use, a 1000 lumen bright LED bulb uses 14W. If we assume you have it switched on 12 hours a day, that 0.7W at 24 hours a day adds 10% to its power usage.
More realistically, your LED bulb will take 10W, and be on for four hours a day, for 40Wh. That means that 16,8Wh adds almost 50% to your power usage.
And I think the typical bulb will use even less power and an even lower duty cycle. 8W, 2 hours a day, and you have a radio broadcaster that occasionally switches on a light :-)
By the way, 0.7W also is also against the spirit of an EU directive on power consumption (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:320...), which by now (it's over four years after this came into force) states:
The power consumption of equipment in any condition providing only a reactivation function, or providing only a reactivation function and a mere indication of enabled reactivation function, shall not exceed 0,50 W.
The results are still a little too janky for my taste but the costs are getting there.
[1] http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-...
I'm also building a RPI kiosk to manage them
Always fun to theorize about hidden names, considering that somewhere somebody probably reasoned themselves into picking 0x56 over the other values.
