Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse.
It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage “cloud” “integration” involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you.
If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that’s what’s going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists, and they are going to auger all of these things into the ground to make their short-term money before flying the coop for the next big thing they can destroy.
I swear, these bad EULA updates that basically force users to “accept the agreement, or we’ll brick your device” needs to fucking stop and be made illegal. The price that’s set for a product, especially a damn physical product, should include the acceptance of an existing EULA, and it should be honoured even when new ones come out and the user chooses to not accept the new agreement. You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless. And you can’t foresee such changes too; a predatory company can acquire one that you’ve trusted and pull this shit. It’s borderline daylight larceny.
The biggest gripe I have with this is that they are not cheep. Hue is one of the more expensive products smart lamp products.
Why are they chasing pennies? I could buy 3 ikea lamps for price of 1 hue.
Shame I really liked their color accuracy but guess I have to find new fancy lights.
Luckily I use home assistant so my lamps are not ewaste.
I know this post didn’t coin the term 'enshitification", but it really is a great way to describe the monetization of everything that was once good on the internet
If they remove the ability to Zigbee to other hubs I swear to god I will be the first one on the class action lawsuit train.
I know you the author doesn’t seem to want to hear about Home Assistant, but it does have the HomeKit integration they want and you have the fine tuned control the want too!
Javascript plus a “curl | sudo sh” attitude to life equals “yeah no, I am never touching this thing”.
Assclown take. Buy a HomeAssistant Yellow and boom done.
Tangentially related, but I recently bought a Philips shaver and the thing wanted me to install an app on my phone and connect it to the shaver via bluetooth to send shaving data.
I mean, I guess there’s theoretically value there for some people? I can’t imagine what, but that app’s staying well off my phone.
Just what you need. A popup on your phone reminding you you’re a scruffy git and not shaved in 7 days.
I bought a Raspberry Pi a few months ago and I feel strangely prepared. I wanted to use Home Assistant to have greater control over my devices since Philips Hue’s app seemed limited.
I feel like a sucker for falling for Philip’s marketing but at least I can use zigbee. I have now decoupled myself from their Hue Hub and app. Unfortunately I now have a wasteful hub sitting around. I have it posted for free on the classifieds in hopes it will disappear.
I have it posted for free on the classifieds in hopes it will disappear.
I bet it will. I managed to sell a few for $40 a piece a couple years back.
I had extras because the kits that included a hub were cheaper than the bare bulbs.
I want a lamp that fades on as an alarm in the morning, and doesn’t require an internet connection. What options do I have?
Before you dive into a complicated diy smart home solution, I recommend looking at an off-the-shelf sunrise alarm clock.
If you’re not going to spend 20 hrs on a diy solution that costs 3x what an off-the-shelf solution costs then why even bother .
Well that personal attack was uncalled for.
I somehow didn’t even consider that as an option. I’ll look into that. Thank you.
I have used this one every day for 4 years, it is really nice and simple (no internet/bluetooth etc just an old school clock with a light). Great min brightness, great max brightness, and has a good 40+min gradual fade from min to max. I’ve tried other ones as well but they didn’t work quite as well as this one.
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Wake-Up-Simulation-HF3500-60/dp/B00F0W1RIW
The only downside is the beeping, which can be fixed in 5 min by drilling a tiny bit right in the center of the speaker hole on the back. So many people do this, there’s a youtube tutorial for it somewhere.
If you’re willing to go the DIY route, ESPHome might be what you’re looking for.
A Sonoff controller on the lamp, linked to a small Home Assistant server (a cheap Raspberry Pi could do) wouldn’t be too expensive and would run locally.
Do people really just have bare PCBs all over their house?
There’s plenty of small cases or even 3D printable stuff available to put them in a nice enclosure. You could also buy something with an enclosure included, like the atom lite which I got some time ago as a cheap bluetooth proxy; https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-lite-esp32-development-kit
I have a lot of ESPs around the house but they are all in enclosures.
Use a Zigbee controller or Zigbee USB stick on a controller, and Zigbee lights. I’m planning to switch to that myself
Use a smart bulb that increases in brightness or color at an specific hour until it is bright enough for you to wake up.
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to change the intensity of the light bulb. I open the hue app and it tells me to download the new app, not allowing me to do anything else. I install the new app and it asks me to register… I still have my bulb at full light :D I’ll either find a compatible open source app or a light bulb that respect my privacy, I got a couple of tplink ones which were cheap and seems to work ok
I’m using TP Link Kasa bulbs at home and they work fine for what I need. They integrate well into Home Assistant.
Home assistant works great with it!
Hue Essentials does the trick on Android
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Ive heard ikea bulbs were pretty good.
Something else to think about - after moving to a new apartment I switched from smart bulbs (hue) to smart switches (Lutron casetta). It seems pricy but since one switch controls multiple bulbs here (4 in one instance) the price difference was negligible.
I’ve lost the ability to set colors but that was always a gimmick for me and Casetta has been even more rock solid than hue.
I’m still not sure if this just will ever impact me since I don’t use the Hue app at all. Everything I HomeKit or home assistant.
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If you’re using home assistant just go directly to controlling the bulbs over Zigbee/ZHA and drop the hue hub entirely!
Works great for me, mind you my bulbs are 5+years old.
Any guides you can point m to for how to replicate this? I’m handy but I meet some technical limits fairly quickly without instruction. Kinda like cooking, I’m great at it a long as I have a recipe to work with.
What if you are using Hue bulbs with Home Assistant. Works totally local and not connected to the internet. How are they going to enforce those to go online?
I replaced my bridge with a Phoscon ConBee II and running the software in docker.
I went with matter supported Nanoleaf who don’t require a bridge nor an account (skip option in the app during set up).
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