I do like the “Friends of Hue” term for the (apparently rather scarce) blessed 3rd party offerings.
So many good Godfather scenes talking about that sort of friendship.
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The GE system IS LED. I made a conscious decision a few years ago to get my house over to this technology…and I bought Zigbee because it was supposed to be open by default. The GE stuff was supposed to be just as good, but the Wink folks had been on the verge of bankruptcy over the last year and seemed to have targetted their development towards products like Smart Egg Cartons (i.e, you buy eggs from the grocery, take all the eggs out of the one you bought, and into the electronic one…so it can remind you when you are almost out of eggs…seriously).
Homekit only requires a bit of reprogramming – there are a few opensource applications of it (Github has a few) but I didn’t want YET ANOTHER product that I had to build myself and maintain software and all that. I just wanted something that worked 
Yeah, mine works just fine. I was just hoping I could use Hue as this was what I was moving towards. I actually have a few Hue (the white only) bulbs that work with my current hub…but my current hub can’t access all the goodness that is baked into these.
Zigbee is the underlying comm link technology. Something like ethernet, or 802.11a/b/g/n.
As I mentioned, their crypto is likely to be either nonexistent or sucky as they are too cheap to have powerful enough chips.
So you are still likely to be able to talk to the devices. May require reverse-engineering of the updated protocol. Knowing how thoughtful corporations are, that may not even be exceedingly difficult.
That’s where e.g. a Raspberry Pi with a Zigbee USB dongle comes to play. Such device can have software to communicate with anything via open and reverse-engineered protocols, and also pose as an arbitrary number of Zigbee devices (think raw sockets, and directly handling the packets in some daemon). A Philips bulb then can look like a GE bulb and vice versa; the same lightbulb can then appear in several instances on the device list, one instance being real (and directly talked with), the others being virtual (and using the raspi as a proxy and protocol translator).
Cheaper ballast if you go for the magnetic one. Heavy, too, and needs to be fed from AC so no DC shenanigans if you have e.g. a battery-powered home, but the weight can serve for mechanical stabilization of the lamp.
The color stabilization does not matter that much for waking up by brightness ramp-up.
The instant on/off is a minor issue, depending on context. I’d suggest to augment it with a lower-power lamp where instant response is needed.
I saw them in a grow shop. The light color looked nice. I don’t have more experiences.
I hate the LED light. Less than I hate the CCFL light and overall behavior. For instant-on it’s classical incandescent or halogen; for high brightness it is metal halide. LEDs may come to play once their phosphors get improved.
…todo, try to make those cadmium selenide quantum dots…
There are laws that should be ignored with extreme prejudice. This is one of them.
There are so many laws we’re breaking a dozen just by waking up. One more won’t make a difference.
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[quote=“clifyt, post:22, topic:70682”]
The GE system IS LED
[/quote]Yeah, I know. My point is that you have a system that currently works for you and will continue to do so, as GE isn’t on ZigbeeP, nor do they seem interested in creating a ZigbeeG until they see how the Philips one goes.
Give it three months and see if you need anything then. You should be fine for at least another year right now with gear you have.
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The issue is that the poster in question has changed over their house. CMH isn’t an option for a home when you move in and out of spaces and don’t want to wait five minutes to use the kitchen,
I have a lot of experience with every source, including plasma (which you might like, incidentally, if not for the cost…), and HPS is not suitable for a home. There are literally no colors other than red and yellow that are prevalent in the spectrum:
There’s a reason cities are moving past it after using it as a standard for forty years, it’s a terrible source whose only positive note was the efficiency. Now that it’s being surpassed they are being replaced at a quick clip.
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Not sure what the difference between ZigbeeP and ZigbeeG is – but they are ALL supposed to work at a baseline if they use any zigbee protocol.
Either way, I’ve had my systems for a while. Back in the day, I had the xcom (err…I think thats what its called) and finally pulled my last switch in my place that had this still up. It worked for many years after that company went out of business. I was just hoping for something a little nicer. And wouldn’t have to upgrade every few years.
No, you are saying what you interpret it to mean. But, believe it or not, most people who do this have never read the actual laws themselves.
There are lots of holes in the laws as they exist. What about further firmware updates? Does the DMCA mean it has been frozen forever? All the DMCA stipulates is that they forbid the reverse-engineering of the firmware. But replacing the firmware with another firmware is still doable. Also, EULAs almost always say that they are subject to change without notice - so change it!
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That’s my convention that I came up with in this thread, as Philips has their own Zigbee, that I call ZigbeeP. I imagine GE is spending this holiday season probing their tech guys about creating a ZigbeeG. 
You talking X10? X10 was the bomb, but, analog carrier signal, so of course it’ll last for years, once you sell it you can’t control it. But it’s certainly still out there and still being supported.
Frankly, hang onto your Zigbee, see how things go. I imagine you’ll actually be fine for longer than you think as long as your app works. Which, interestingly, is exactly why I steer people away from phone-based processing/programming solutions. Having lived through an iOS upgrade that obsoleted a good many apps there’s no guarantee how long the software and hardware will work together unless you make it yourself or get a more expensive system. 
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‘Zigbee’ includes the underlying link tech; both the RF and 802.15.4 elements; but also includes ‘application profiles’, analogous to the infestation of them that Bluetooth has, intended to ease interoperability between devices too limited or fixed-function for any sort of driver updates.
That’s what is particularly shabby about what Phillips is doing here: The “light link 1.0” application protocol is already there to allow interoperation among zigbee-controlled lighting devices; and my understanding is that that is what the products being locked out were using(presumably with a ‘where Phillips deviates from the standard, do as they do because they have Hue’).
Pretty much the equivalent of a phone just refusing to interact with any bluetooth headset not from the same vendor "for compatibility reasons’. I’d be curious to know if any of the other ‘zigbee alliance’ members are considering giving Phillips a bit of a talking to about screwing it up when Insteon, ‘Homekit’, and various others are still very much in the running…
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I think it is the same Zigbee underneath. The Zigbee itself, as I understand it, describes how the packets are addressed and encoded to the ultimately analog signal that goes to the antenna. (Everything that hits the wire or the air is fundamentally analog. Forgetting this can lead to hours and days of debugging and chasing ghosts when something goes wrong.)
Kind of like IP for the addressing/routing married with Ethernet for the link layer.
It does not describe the payload of the packets, the higher-level communication protocol. And there is apparently the key difference between vendors.
Ahhh. That means that my hypothesis about the possible translator node that’d make real devices from vendor X also appear as virtual devices from vendor Y being viable.
That sounds to me like a firing squad deserving offense.
…also, thanks and sorry for only one available like point.
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That’s what it was called! X10…I bought my first modules from something like the HeathKit catalog and then RadioShack carried them for a while. Probably tells you how old I am. Had to get all the relay systems. Finally gave them all away 5 or 6 years ago except for the ones that were physically built into my walls.
Either way, the protocol for Zigbee is like MIDI…you have addressable devices and there are standards. Turn them on / turn them off. In the synth world, we know that Control Channel (CC) value 7 ALWAYS control the volume and CC 10 controls that pan. These are standards throughout the system (and there are a few other CCs that were defined in the initial protocol). And then you get what is known as GeneralMidi…which standardizes a bunch of others, 91 is Reverb, 93 is chorus. General Midi is like the 2.0. Guess what? You can STILL turn ancient machines on and off knowing what system channel they are on, and then throw them the appropriate CC.
Even if your ZigbeeP and ZigbeeG are different, they still have the standard addressing schemes and base commands. Phillips is looking at their MAC Address (or whatever the zigbee equivelent is) and saying Hey This Isn’t In Our Range, Not Our Product…and refusing to turn them on or off. I wouldn’t be upset if they decided not to use anything past the base commands. Again – my GE system can’t address color HUE bulbs to change the color – but it can turn them on and off.
The whole point is, it is an open system and nothing has changed – other than they decided to lock out any bulb that didn’t pay them money. Nothing more. Pisses me off.
And like all first world problems, I’ll live with it. BoingBoing, you got first world problems, we will bitch about them.
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No I got rid of those systems! 5 years ago! The last one I had was a year or two ago that I had wired two devices into my ceiling fan so that I could control it all with a remote, but the remote was long gone, and the wall switch stopped working, so it finally got removed. It was the last vestigial portion of this system.
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Well, except for obvious applications…
(Orchids!! I’m talkin about orchids!!)
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Your words, not mine. 
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Not even then, CMH efficiency has surpassed sodium…
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TIL to stop stealing overhead street lamps.
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Yeah, all you’re doing is making your town happy by driving down their energy use.
So, thinking about it, maybe you should keep it up. Start taking the ballasts too and that’ll save a few man hours…
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Given that I didn’t have the receivers anymore, they didn’t really do anything.
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