I've been gone from Coopersburg for 15 years but I still practice the engineering culture I learned there.
Fun fact: I don't know what they do today but when I was there it was a long standing tradition that engineers put in some time on the customer support phones. That way you get direct (and sometimes very unfiltered) feedback from users and their expectations on your product and understanding of the instructions you wrote. So if you call the 800 number it's not going to India and you might get to talk to one of the (lower level) engineers that made the product!
The interview sat across from me and role-played a customer calling to complain about a vague issue happening in their home. I then had to roleplay asking the customer and various internal teams (all played by the interviewer) questions, forming hypotheses, running imaginary tests (the interviewer would tell me the outcome), and so on. I started from "The lights in this room don't work right", then clarified and trouble-shot through to the underlying issue, and finally to a root cause.
At the time it seemed super weird, but looking back on it years later, it was a clear exercise in troubleshooting skill - something that remains invaluable in engineering. It's one of the only times before or since that I can recall being tested on that specifically, even though it comes up all the time in my day-to-day job.
From what you describe, this challenges sounds like that was emblematic of the culture there. :)
Also - typically, no matter where the potential job would be physically located, there would be at least one interview where you had to get on a plane and travel to complete - it weeded-out anyone who wasn't willing to actually travel for a role that required 70%+ time on-the-road.
If you accepted the position, there was a multi-week bootcamp - that would also include a week of paired shadowing telephone support calls.
Before this, the tradition at engineering companies was that the "kids fresh out of school" would start in Manufacturing or Service so they'd have some experience with the difference between design engineering and actually being able to build or repair the thing you designed.
It seems that this doesn't happen much anymore.
I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly, together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half now.
It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.
[edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...
This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.
This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto the ground.
Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]
After a time away, I tried to turn on lights with my phone -- only to be greeted by a message like "There is a mandatory update available for your bridge. You can use your system again after 10 minutes". I found not being able to turn on the lights for 10 minutes because they were installing unprompted updates completely unacceptable, so that was my last day as a Hue user. I now use a mix of Zigbee bulbs controlled with a (stable, offline) zigbee2mqtt gateway.
And then on the other we have the usability pain like this. I'd rather pay a few dollars more for more storage or an A/B firmware system so the upgrade can run async and minimize interruption.
I also have another zigbee dongle with zigbee2mqtt and zigbee2mqtt is what gives me problems particularly if the power goes out over the house.
I'm going to stick with my regular old legacy light switches and bulbs as long as I possibly can.
The hack is worth it for the reliability of Lutron. The Caseta system never fails for me.
They do if you use a “middleware” to tie together the systems like Home Assistant or HomeBridge. I raise and lower zwave blinds using a pico switch.
ArsTechnica has a look inside a similar module in the Hue Tap.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gallery-dissecting-t...
RunLessWire looks to be selling two variants of them, one with the same 2.4 GHz module as above for use with Hue, and another version for on/off circuit control, which would be 902 MHz EnOcean in the US.
> you have to learn how to properly press them (with about a 200ms hold)
Most of them want to proxy all attempts to turn on a light switch via AWS. Which is madness.
With Lutron, beyond the things you mentioned, two more of my unexpectedly favorite features have been:
1) being able to add additional wall switches anywhere and program them to control any set of lights, without any extra electrical wiring (for 3-way or 4-way switches, or controlling multiple lighting circuits with one switch)
2) range-based programming (e.g. automatically turning on lights for rooms from the garage to kitchen when you're arriving home)
Other devices like smart locks, smart garage doors, water leak alarm sensors, and AV equipment have all been useful and generally worked well for me. Some of them have been slightly fussy, but not as a general rule and certainly not to an "unbearable" extent. Overall, they really do make things significantly better, at a surprisingly low cost compared to the rest of home construction.
I do have a few wifi devices for cases where there is no good ZWave option (or the wifi options are just better, like the OpenGarage garage door controller).
I really enjoy being able to double tap the "off" position of the switch in our bedroom when we turn in for the night and have it do all the things (thermostats turned down, doors locked, garage doors closed, lights off, etc). Once that script finishes it triggers a verification script that double checks the status of all other devices and sends a push notification to our phones confirming everything was done.
I previously used a different brand to control my aquarium lights and HATED it. When the app randomly made me enter my password to turn the lights on, I 1-starred it with a very frank, "my old-fashioned light switch doesn't randomly ask me to enter my password" in the review.
One complaint that I have about the Lutron system is that they don't offer relay-based modules. (The old X10 system did.) Aquarium lights run very poorly off of the Lutron modules, so I wired up some 120V relays for my aquariums. I also use a Lutron module to control an outdoor outlet for holiday lights, and had to do the same thing; wire in a high amperage 120V relay into the switch.
Yes they do, here is the cutsheet: https://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/369-549b_Eng...
This one can switch 5A using a Pico input device.
Just to be clear, every commercial lighting controls line has relay modules, it’s necessary for occupancy sensing.
At least as far as controlling the outlet for holiday lighting: It is a 15-amp circuit, and I could easily anticipate plugging in a power-hungry tool at some time.
https://www.lutron.com/ExternalTechnicalDocumentLibrary/AL-1...
This seems like a hole in their lineup.
In the analog world we'd just wire those 18 lights on a circuit controlled by a single switch...
zwave doesn’t come close to the reliability of lutron so dumb it shall be
> I did my whole house in Lutron’s smart switches
Lrf, V'z wbxvat.
Taking this as joke as one doesn’t often turn on lights when power’s out …
But I used Caseta in a home with a generator since the Lutron light switches and dimmers are physical switches that happily work without any smarthome features.
Unplug your hub and they all work except for the ones that don’t get wired (the ones that are their remote, just stuck on a wall).
Pretty much the top selling point of Caseta for me, was working like normal switches. Gravy is how much more responsive than Hue or similar.
Well I go start up my backup nuclear reactor in the basement of course.
WiFi is the enemy.
How do they compare with IKEAs "TRÅDFRI" offerings?
While they've always sold dimmer switches at the store for the average homeowner, they're better "known" for commercial installations. Think the lighting controls and software to manage the lighting for an entire office building, corporate campus, museum, etc. The expectation in terms of reliability and scalability is a bit different.
The switches aren’t Wi-Fi connected, because Wi-Fi would be an awful choice for 50 devices that you only communicate with a few times a day. They use their own wireless frequency and communicate in a really simple/reliable way to the bridge, which is wired to my router and doesn’t need an internet connection to work.
There’s no always-running cloud service, the light switches work even when the internet is down (and I can still use the home app too in such an event, just no voice control.)
Siri is finicky sometimes, but I’d wager a 97% success rate in saying things like “set the scene Evening Downstairs” and “turn off all the lights except in the bedroom.”
My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off, which makes it so much nicer in the basement where I have 18 different lights to turn on and I can just hit one switch on my way downstairs and it’s fully illuminated (no voice command necessary) and I don’t have to visit 18 light switches to turn them off again.
Home automation tech must be invisible and fall back gracefully, and must always be interact-able in a “dumb” way, or else it’s just playing games IMO.