My rented apartment has switches that presumably use radio to turn on and off the lights.

There is no further integration, or smart app etc.

I can't see which light switch is on or off, so even after years living here I mix up some of the switches.

Sometimes the radio pulse doesn't register, so I have to go back to the switch and press it again.

After pressing the switch, there's a perceivable, variable delay for the light to come on.

Guests are confused.

There are only downsides with such a system.

At work we have a few rooms that have 4 buttons organized in what normally is one light switch. Each button controls different parts of the rooms. I call them Heisenbuttons, you never know what they'll do until you've pressed them.

Tried operating them with your eyes closed? Real Heisenbuttons change their behaviour depending on whether or not they're being observed.

The upside to wireless switches are how cheap they to install and remove.

I'm in a 40 year old apartment with a lot of switches that now affect nothing, because they broke and no one fixed the wires ('cause landlords are cheap). I wouldn't want to change this for a bunch of wireless switches but it's easy to imagine landlords of the future wanting nothing but glue on fixtures - routing wires costs significant money.

Are you saying the switch is broken? Those can be replaced in about 15 mins and cost very little. The wires in wall rarely break and if do that could be a very dangerous situation.

There are switches that literally don't go any fixture or outlets at all, there's not even a visible sign of a fixture being removed. I assume the fixture was removed sometime during buildings life.

Waiting for “yeah there is a circuit that trips the breaker even with nothing plugged in”

These kinds of switches are perfectly analogous to technical debt. Doing things the right/straightforward way involves costs that we don’t want to pay (holes in the wall/labour to run a new circuit) so we shoehorn a complex hack using some new tech (RF control). The cost savings are moderate and the price paid is amortized over every further use of the system.

A few years down the road, the radio switch transmitter breaks down and is no longer manufactured. The receivers, wires and the mechanical switches blocked in the ON position are hidden somewhere under multiple layers of drywall.

But the functionality of the switch can be emulated with with a software defined radio attached to a 1GHz Raspberry Pi running Linux. It works great, but an out of date kernel enables a virus that spreads from light-switch to light switch and performs a light show on the evening of 4th of July in any calendar year.

Wouldn’t the switches just be placed in the boxes for the old switches? Burying a switch as you describe is against code in the US and I assume other countries.

He's taking the ball and running with it

also he seems to think that people put up multiple layers of drywall like it's wallpaper?

That sounds very frustrating, but I'd like to put my two cents in.

All our lights in our rented apartment are ikea TRÅDFRI smart lights, we have the ikea 5 button remote in a lot of the rooms and google home's spread around.

The whole system works with zigbee -> mqtt and home assistant and it took me a year to iron the bugs out. But generally it seldomly takes over half a second for the lights to respond to a command. If something breaks down it's almost always because I changed a config, not by itself. And it's really fun and nice to be able to make any button do any action by just editing an UI :) Or automate something we feel should happen by itself.

I like to think of it as it being a system that we can fit around our own lives and how we like things, instead of having to accept the situation as is (button is here and controls this light at this brightness). And it's not overly expensive either!

In terms of fixing the immediate problem you have, I wonder if maybe the frequency being used by the switch would be in the 2.4Ghz range and your WiFi using the same channel.

I don't know if that's possible with remote switches, but with zigbee there's overlap possible. (https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/zigbee-wifi-coex...)

Or maybe the batteries in the remote are running low?

And if you would like to also control that light using an app on your phone or voice commands if you use "Ok google": the Broadlink RM Pro could maybe allow you to control the light using an app.

I installed a wireless (RF) switch and I like it. It lights a tiny LED when it's on, and it is as reliable as a hardwired switch.

The big advantage is that it provides separate fan and light controls without needing to run new electrical wires through the wall and ceiling.

You are living in the little hell we created. Sorry.

And even if there is a physical switch, it is not clear what that switch is doing. My bluetooth headset has a hardware on/off switch. However, when the switch is turned off, it plays a sound to say the words "power off". If it were a physical switch across the battery, then I would expect the power to be immediately cut, and it shouldn't have the power to say that the power has been cut.

But then how would you know it's really off!

I sense sarcasm, but I'll answer anyway.

A power indicator light would do the trick...

But in all seriousness, your bluetooth headphones should have a sim card built in and be an IoT slave to the cloud. So that when you turn them off, they send a message to Alexa, Google, and Siri, so that all of your devices can tell you "YOUR HEADPHONES ARE NOW OFF" at the same time. Like a tiny choir of angels informing you of the new state of your device.

But of course, there will be one slow/older device that lags 0.3 seconds behind and says "HEADPHONES...OFF", completely out of sync with the rest, like a rebel.

Damnit, toilet! Get with the times...

𝕐𝕆𝕌ℝ 𝕁𝔸ℂ𝕂𝔼𝕋 𝕀𝕊 ℕ𝕆𝕎 𝔻ℝ𝕐

This reminds me of that one dystopian text adventure game the verge put out a while ago.

The version on the original site now links to here:

https://adirobertson.itch.io/wake-word

for those who haven't played it yet.

The way I've been able to learn that devices are off since the early 2000s is that the blindingly bright blue LED light is replaced by a blindingly bright red LED light.

I really hate those. When your house is dark and it's calm and all you see are little eyes of Sauron floating in the darkness. I've gone around my house with masking tape and covered every unnecessary visible light.

Google Wifi is one of the worst offenders. They might as well market it as a wifi-repeating lamp.

You can adjust the brightness of the light ring from the Google Wifi app (all the way down to "off"!).

Thank you. This helps a lot. I didn't think to look for it.

I have always wanted a flashlight with a brightness knob, that clicks to off.

It is incredibly hard to find this. I have one somewhere, but the knob was a little silly:

https://amzn.com/B07BDQS3XX

I think a better design would be a ring around the circumference that you twist.

But I agree - when it came to putting a good stereo in my car (when you used to be able to do such a thing) I always kept looking until I found one with an actual volume knob. In a moving car - grabbing a knob and finding the right volume level is immediate and doable.

By the way, schiit hel: https://www.schiit.com/products/hel

> I have always wanted a flashlight with a brightness knob, that clicks to off... a ring around the circumference

There is one: the Jetbeam RRT-01, at least certain iterations of it. Most designs use a separate power switch.

This isn't more common because there's a patent covering using a Hall effect sensor in a ring around a flashlight body for this purpose, and the patent holder, Surefire has sued several manufacturers and vendors over it. A well-funded challenge would probably succeed on obviousness grounds, but patent challenges are expensive and I don't think the flashlight industry is profitable enough to justify it. The patent expires in three years, so this will probably become more common then.

maybe when the patent expires in a few years this will become common then.

Funny that I didn't see one from surefire. They should be cleaning up.

They've made a couple using mode selector rings, but not infinite dimming. The UDR Dominator does have an off position on its dial, but that's not intended to be the main switch. You don't see those often, as the market for $1200 flashlights, especially relatively outdated ones is small.

Schiit audio is quite good, I have had the Magni 2 and Modi 2 for about 4 years now and they work really well. And they're small enough that I can throw in my backpack when I go somewhere for longer (>2 months) period of time.

You want one of these: http://flashlights.parametrek.com/index.html?type=flashlight...

I have one of those flashlights (Sunwayman V25C), I love the UI. It's quite old, not sure if they're sold anymore.

You can try searching for "infinitely variable" flashlights. Jetbeam RRT01 is one such example.

For a little extra "oomph", there's also https://skylumen.com/collections/v54-lights?sort_by=created-...

Maglite flashlights behave as you describe - you turn the head to turn on/off and change intensity or pattern

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=maglite

Unless something's changed since I bought my big maglite, the outer ring only controls the beam pattern, and the button just gives you on and off. Things might have got fancier in the meanwhile, but mine still does what it needs to.

Modern ones work as you describe, but you can also press the button multiple times quickly when first turning it on to control the brightness. One press for bright, "double-click" for average, "triple-click" for dim.

Probably because you actually don't want your gamepad to turn off as you fumble a combo or your headphones to turn off as you operate buttons you can't see.

In other cases its usually to double dip on input components.

I don't want a button, I want a physical switch with two positions in a place where I am not likely to switch it accidentally.

And when I switch it, it should turn on or off fast enough close to instantly: this should not be a high-cost operation which requires a UX mitigation.

If I toggle a light switch accidentally, I'm not concerned about it, because it's so easy and fast to correct my mistake.

That's one of the reasons why I love my good old Bose QC 15 headphones: they have a physical switch that turns off the noise cancelling and also acts as a reliable no-delay audio kill switch. Some people would complain that you can't turn off the NC and keep listening to music, but I think the switch is actually more useful this way...