Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment

Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by imoverclocked on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:05PM (#39889040)

I purchased a bunch of Phillips Hue bulbs and they have started to age out. I hadn’t paid much attention to the space and found out that Phillips was phasing the Hue ecosystem out in favor of just connecting everything to WiFi directly. I purchased two bulbs to give it a try and one has connectivity issues while the other has severe quality issues (flickering, refusing to turn off, etc)

I really like the Hue ecosystem but not being able to keep buying into it a mere 5 years later is a big turnoff.

One of the two newer bulbs from Philips supported Matter by updating the firmware. It wasn’t at all clear that would be the case when I purchased them.

Finally, I’ve learned to avoid anything that supports “Siri shortcuts.” I want actual support so my home app and thus HomePods can do the right thing out of the box.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by dotnet00 on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:20PM (#39889160)

It's been a while since I bought my Hue bulbs, but they support Zigbee and you can make homeassistant talk to them over zigbee2mqtt and a usb to zigbee dongle. I haven't used the Hue app in years.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by WirelessGigabit on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:30PM (#39889248)

I bought a house full of zigbee sensors. Any recommendations for a good USB dongle?

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by thatfunkymunki on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:04PM (#39889473)

I like the Aeotec one, works well with home assistant. I also have their zwave dongle which similarly works well.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by stavros on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:04PM (#39889472)

The Sonoff Zigbee one is the go-to. Works extremely well with Z2M.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by dotnet00 on Sunday March 31, 2024 @09:06PM (#39889861)

I've been using a CC2531 dongle, but that's a little DIY, being a bare PCB dongle that needs to be flashed with a firmware using a separate programmer cable (over, say, an RPi's GPIO). Back when I bought it, it was cheaper than a ready-to-go dongle and flashing it wasn't all that big a deal.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by WWLink on Monday April 01, 2024 @01:53AM (#39891246)

Ah, the wiz bulbs. Those are pretty dumb and I think the most effective approach is to put them on a VLAN that is firewalled off from the internet. You can control them with OpenRGB or Home Assistant. It's both a good thing and a bad thing I guess. If you disable the remote access via vlan firewall, I think the worst that could happen is someone gains remote access into your network and turns the lights off on you lol.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by debian3 on Monday April 01, 2024 @06:47AM (#39892664)

I bought mine in 2013, I have about 30 light around the house. Over the years 1 failed (it was turning back on by itself). I obviously have the old generation lightbulbs, the new one might be different, but for me they have been incredibly reliable.

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Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment by staticman2 on Monday April 01, 2024 @12:33PM (#39895979)

Hue isn't being phased out. Phillips has a cheaper non-Hue product as well but I don't know where you got the idea Hue was going away.

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