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  • mikato - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    The very small standby power mode it has now makes it more interesting as you can leave its power switched on and use the network to control it fully - making for a possibly more networked home in the future.
  • ddriver - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    It could actually have tremendously lower idle power use. That microcontroller is a ridiculous overhead for light bulb, it would be proportional to a quad socket 48 core xeon system with 128 gigs of ram for a machine dedicated to emails...

    The more elegant solution would be a single control unit for all lightning as well as other home automation, "smart bulbs" are a clumsy and inefficient solution. I'd rather have a "smart home" than a "dumb home with smart light bulbs".
  • MrSpadge - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Agreed - I think it would make more sense to include a small controller in th lamp itself, which will contain several bulbs. Which themselves will fail at some point and get replaced by the next ones.
  • Solandri - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    Actually, it sounds like we need a new electrical standard. Kinda like the converse of PoE where you send power along cabling initially intended for network signals.

    A low bandwidth (so as to not cause widespread high-frequency interference) powerline ethernet standard should allow you to plug in "smart" bulbs into a home's standard electrical sockets, and have them controlled via a central control station which communicates with the bulbs over powerline ethernet. Only the control station would need wifi connectivity so you could control it. The individual bulbs would only need to receive instructions next time they were turned on and announced themselves to the control station, thus eliminating the always-on power draw of putting a wifi receiver onto every light bulb.
  • Navvie - Monday, June 15, 2015 - link

    Something like X10?
  • Zefeh - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I could see something as simple as the ESP8266 WiFi module as something that you could use instead of what they have. Load it up with the customized LUA firmware on the net and you have a pretty decent cheap small Microcontroller that can run LUA scripts with rx/tx WiFi comm, 2 GPIO's (some revisions) for 3.3 volt operation and around 23kb flash to mess with. Low power and cheap at 5 bucks a piece!

    Slapping an Cortex-M4 on there is ridiculous I agree. House automation systems should have a comm base that does all the decision making. The bulbs just need to communicate and turn on/off/dim.

    Another interesting thing to think about is power wire communication. Had a prof. In college working on it, working on transmitting signals through already in place infrastructure and then just making the end points like lightbulbs understand what's said and complies with the request. Interesting concept to think of, very similar to the household WiFi power plug adapters.
  • boozed - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I'd love to have lightning in my house but my friends disagree.
  • Wwhat - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    " I'd rather have a "smart home" than a "dumb home with smart light bulbs"."

    Well I'm sure daddy will buy you one..
  • ddriver - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    Because that's how you get stuff?
  • chrysrobyn - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I could get really excited about this and deploy 10-20 throughout my house, if they could automatically change the white color based on the time of day. I'm really curious about the research into circadian rhythms getting input from light color and I'd like to try it out at home.
  • ganeshts - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I think that should be easily achievable using the documentation that has already been provided by LIFX for the protocol. Maybe LIFX should add that option in their app itself. Will provide them feedback on it.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Please also provide feedback that some users (such as myself) will not purchase cloud-only devices. I can already control all the lighting, media devices, and other devices in my home without the cloud, so there's no reason to buy this if it adds another hurdle or need for another app. That's really too bad.
  • ganeshts - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Trust me, that is one of the first things I tell to anyone pitching home automation devices for coverage.

    That is also one of the main reasons we gave the Ubiquiti Networks mFi the 'Recommended' tag last time around.
  • Nogami - Monday, June 15, 2015 - link

    Although it's not the same product, I do exactly this at home with my Philips Hue setup. We've re-done our entire condo with "smart LED bulbs", and besides saving power, having the ability to adjust colour and brightness automatically via a schedule is amazing. Easily the best "whole home" purchase we made last year.

    For example, at 11:30 at night, all lights except the bedroom gradually darken to "off" over about 10 minutes (leaving ample time to pause if we're staying up late), while the bedroom lights fade to about 50% intensity over 10 minutes and change to a very warm orange/red colour temperature.

    At midnight, all bedroom lights except for a night-light dim down to "off" over 5 minutes, then the night-light goes down after that.

    In the morning, light start out as a deep red/orange colour and gradually brighten over 20 minutes as we get up, and the colour temperature shifts to a more white colour as the cycle completes.

    Then everything automatically shuts off as we're out the door to work. We also have some evening schedule settings to periodically dim lights off after 2-3 minutes every 60 minutes (the ones we tend to forget to turn off as we're around the house in the evenings), to save power.
  • modulusshift - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    What's the CRI of these bulbs? I find that helps more than temperature alone for dark winter areas.
  • ganeshts - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    LIFX claims all their bulbs have CRI > 80. Unfortunately, I didn't test that out myself.
  • SeannyB - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    It'd be nice to see some more exact readings on color temperature (is there a green or magenta tint?), CRI and a color spectrum graph, but I suppose that would require an investment in a color spectrometer.

    On a general note... I love the idea of LED bulbs that can vary their color temperature throughout the day, but the price is way outside of the ballpark of regular old 2700K name-brand LED bulbs. Years after the Philips Hue, they're still in the early-adopter price range.
  • boozed - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    A quick and dirty test that can be performed without any specialised equipment (Anandtech can't afford a spectrometer?) would be to take a photo of a neutral grey target illuminated only by the light bulb with a digital camera on which the white balance has been set to daylight. Obviously it doesn't give you a spectrum, but it will give you a reasonable idea of the comparative difference in colour temperature and cast between illuminators.

    And a simple DIY spectrometer consists of nothing more than a glass prism, a box with a narrow slit, a dark room and a camera.
  • Daniel Egger - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    Or better use a color correction card and shoot that under the lighting then use the software to create a color correction profile and put the results here. Something like the X-rite Color Checker Passport should work just fine for that.
  • RBFL - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    How do you observe audible humming? It would have to be quite severe!
  • pixelstuff - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    By your comment it sounds like you think "observe" means to visually see something, but the dictionary definition of observe is simply to "notice or perceive (something) and register it as being significant."
  • Zak - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution? What revolution? It's a solution that needs a problem first, far from a revolution.
  • zepi - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    The kind of revolution that a lot of people don't really notice it before they are napping on the sofa and telling stories to their grand children.

    And even then they only notice it from the way the their kid's eyes lighting up from excitement and disbelief when you tell that back then you had to drive your own car, switch on the lights from a physical switch and get groceries yourself. And that no, your fridge & cupboard really didn't used to get filled automatically with your favourite breakfast cereals & milk by little flying drones...

    And that your clothes didn't measure your blood pressure and people actually didn't get always get instantly help for heart attack or stroke, because their clothes didn't measure their health level and weren't connected.

    etc.

    Thing that seem unnecessary and not really revolutionary now, but that you'll be missing once you are used to them.
  • Ratman6161 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Also explain to them how we didn't have to worry about the security of our light bulbs or software updates for them :)
  • Impulses - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    You never had to worry about the security of your POTS or updates for it either, but I don't see anyone ditching their smartphone over the occasional glitch or risk...
  • marvdmartian - Monday, June 15, 2015 - link

    The trick, of course, would be getting used to them. That would require actually wanting and using the items.

    At $60 for a lightbulb, I'm pretty sure that will not ever be the case, at least so far as I'm concerned. I have no need to "use the cloud" to control lights in my house. If I'm home, I can turn them on an off myself. If I'm away, I can utilize motion detectors or timers (both infinitely cheaper than a $60 lightbulb) to do so.

    It's also doubtful my interest will be piqued, once the price comes down on these devices. As Zak said, it's a solution in need of a problem.
  • cjs150 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    " it would be good to not install the unit in a tight space with inadequate airflow."

    Such as, for example, as a downlighter in a ceiling?

    The truth is that these are still very niche applications, several years away from mainstream domestic use. Most domestic use has not even moved to LED bulbs never mind IoT connected LED bulbs.

    The concept is good, but there is a lot of work needed before ready for mainstream domestic use even for new builds
  • melgross - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    That's not true. I have 11 cans in my kitchen. I'm replacing the compact fluorescents as they go. 6 more and counting. I've also replaced a number of others around the house. My dining room has a 5 light chandelier, at first, I had 5 40 watt incandescent bulbs in there for a total of 200 watts. Then for a short time, about a year and a half, I used compacts, at 10 watts each for 50 watts total. But they didn't last anywhere as long as their ratings, so I let them die. Now, I've got LEDs. They consume 5.5 watts each, for a total of 27.5 watts. They put out a measured lumens that equal the old incandescents. But these last 27.5 thousand hours. I've had them for over a year and a half now, and they're great.

    I also have LEDs in a number of lamp fixtures.

    The prices have plummeted over the last two years as Cree released cheap, but very good bulbs. Everyone else has had to drop their prices accordingly. I would never buy anything else now. And the efficiency keeps going up. The average good quality LED now has a higher lumen/watt ratio than the best compacts.
  • jabber - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Filed under - More expensive cr*p I'll never need.

    Make your home an even bigger liability.
  • der - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Smart bulbin
  • jjj - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I hate it when the term"smart"gets abused like this. Unless there is something smart about it and you failed to mention it, this is just a connected bulb. If it could at least auto-adjust brightness and be able to detect people ,then maybe it could be called smart.
    Why does everybody wants to screw the user by injecting themselves in the middle. Sure not a huge problem here like with locks but they really need to stop it with their own servers.
    And 40$ for a bulb is beyond outrageous , when normal LED bulbs cost a few times less and they are seen as very expensive anyway, you can't do this and pretend the product is viable.
    Then on the software side you can't have an app for every connected device in a home and for now that's a mess.
    I get it that it's new and cool so you get carried away but the thing speaks volumes about the state of IoT. Poorly thought, poorly executed ,dumb and overpriced. Not that it's easy to do better given the mess when it comes to standards, software and even the less than optimal silicon solutions but it feels likely people can't even be bothered to try.

    I guess being able to rent one (lol) would be useful if you aren't sure what temperature to buy so you just test a few and then go buy a normal bulb.
  • name99 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I'm a little curious as to WTF their app thinks it's doing. Is this standard for Android?
    They want

    - location. OK, that's a reasonable use case for on/off geo-fencing when I enter/leave the house.

    - WiFi connection info? Why? Is this so the app can say "I can't find the lightbulb on WiFi network X, try another network?" I'd have thought
    [a] the way to set this up properly is to bring Bluetooth or NFC into the mix. That's the way the most modern user-friendly set-ups for these devices are going.
    it's the job of the OS to tell the user the WiFi network and ask for that to be changed. Having apps do this seems both broken in terms of UI+functionality and one more damn thing that should not be the app's business.

    - Identity. Why?

    - camera/microphone/photos? WTF????
  • name99 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    sorry, didn't mean to bold the above. Didn't realize your markup would interpret [ b ] that way.
  • zepi - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    At least philips hue supports functions like "make the my lights mimic the colors of this image / whatever comes from camera" and some 3rd party apps also control the lights to the beat of the music that is being played.

    And hues are slow compared to lifx, which probably would even work nicely as a color strobe at the party (the fancy RGB version).
  • fic2 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    Downloaded the Light Meter app to check my cheap ($2) LED bulb temps. They say they are 2700K but look closer to 3000K to me. Which is great since I would rather have 3000K temp. I wish stores would stock different temp bulbs though.
  • fic2 - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I would love to change light temps on my bulbs but for a $38 difference in bulb price I'll stay with one temp. Maybe in 5-10 years these will be cheap.
  • jonsmirl - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    What did they use for an AC power supply chip?
  • mkozakewich - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I wish we'd move entirely away from colour temperature. Black-body radiators are kind of restrictive. I'd prefer to be able to select from RGB or something. Maybe some time I'll want a sunset purple. Usually I want something very close to white, except with more yellow. Pantone lightbulbs!

    Also, it shouldn't be hard to make 1600-lumen bulbs, now. I remember hearing about LEDs with 200-lumens-per-watt efficacy back in 2009, but they still don't seem to be delivering. I've got a Philips bulb that uses nine ultraviolet LEDs under fluorescing panels, but it's still 12.5 Watts for 800 lumens (64 lumens/Watt or 88 lumens per LED).

    Those 'corncob' lights are interesting. Check this out: http://www.renesola.ca/renesola-20w-led-corn-light...

    By the nature of arrays, they go up to 100 W or more.
  • melgross - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    The multiple LED bulbs, such as the corncobs, are the least efficient, as they use older LEDs. Cree has bulbs that are from 85-100 lumens/watt. Next year, we'll see over 100. There has never been a 200 lumen/watt LED out of the lab.
  • Coldsnap - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    This is actually pretty exciting. The dream is to have the full house setup with smart bulbs that can change the color temp automatically throughout the day to mimic what the sun is actually putting off temp wise. This would actually make a BIG difference in energy during the day and sleep quality, if you are the type who is in doors most the day.
  • sor - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    What sort of capacitors does this have? The common problem with LED bulbs today is that the caps will die long before the 22 year rating of the LEDs. The heat of the bulb evaporates the electrolyte and shortens the life of already mediocre caps. I'd give most LED bulbs a 5-10 year rating, personally based on this.
  • sor - Friday, June 12, 2015 - link

    I also don't get the wifi-switched bulbs. It seems cool on the face, until you realize that you have to train yourself and family to pull out their phones instead of flipping the light switch, which is now a useless switch.
  • fluxtatic - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    I didn't get any LED bulbs until I found them for $5 a pop. Even $7.99 was more than I'd pay, given how cheap decent CFLs are. And the power savings over CFLs isn't really all that fantastic, either.

    All that said, $40 apiece for these strikes me as absolutely ludicrous. Apparently not everyone feels that way, and spend your money the way you want, I suppose. Maybe I'm getting old, but this is definitely over in "get off my lawn" territory for me.
  • Pork@III - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    $40 for lighbulb too expensive. In my country have normal bulbs 30¢ per one.
  • Wombat2013 - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    An interesting post from OpenDNS about IoT vulnerabilities (from an enterprise perspective, but still of interest to individuals):
    https://blog.opendns.com/2015/06/02/opendns-enterp...
  • Solandri - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link

    Actually, it sounds like we need a new electrical standard. Kinda like the converse of PoE where you send power along cabling initially intended for network signals.

    A low bandwidth (so as to not cause widespread high-frequency interference) powerline ethernet standard should allow you to plug in "smart" bulbs into a home's standard electrical sockets, and have them controlled via a central control station which communicates with the bulbs over powerline ethernet. Only the control station would need wifi connectivity so you could control it. The individual bulbs would only need to receive instructions next time they were turned on and announced themselves to the control station, thus eliminating the always-on power draw of putting a wifi receiver onto every light bulb.
  • sor - Sunday, June 14, 2015 - link

    There are actually quite a few power line network solutions. Most of them are one to one though, like a bridge between rooms. The issue is that home power is one big bus, so you'd be dealing with a lot of collisions. You'd also have to get people to buy an extra device that is the power line equivalent to the WiFi router they already have. I don't think it would save on cost, either.
  • sor - Sunday, June 14, 2015 - link

    I have some arduino projects with 2.4GHz radios that have lasted over a year so far on a 3v coin cell. They modulate between on/off to achieve that, but the point is that the radio, even powered, only pulls a few mA. You can also put the radio into sleep mode where it is not fully powered but can still receive messages and can send an interrupt to your microcontroller to wake it up when there is data in the radio buffer. That's how you get good battery life, your CPU only wakes up for a few ms to process messages when necessary and goes back to sleep.

    Their power draw might be due to parasitic power supply losses, like wall wart power adaptors, and the logic chip itself, perhaps combined with laziness in always powering the CPU/radio because they aren't on battery.
  • badkat7 - Sunday, June 14, 2015 - link

    While examining the light, did the author take a look at the power supply / drive circuitry? The reason I ask is because I've just completed a study of CFL light failures which causes me to question the claims of manufacturers for life expectancies of 22,500 hours (or similar claims) for LEDs.

    In my analysis of CFLs from two major manufacturers (over 100 lights) I discovered that over 90% of CFLs quit due to circuit board failures rather than the CFL element. The root cause down-rated components (especially the transistors) and electrolytic capacitor failure. In particular, thermal probes indicated the electronics were running in ambient temperatures of almost 80 deg C. Looking back at earlier CFL drivers I noted they used beefier transistors (or FETs) and higher voltage capacitors. Regardless, the figures quoted by manufacturers are completely unobtainable. Looking at component manufacturer's charts, the average life of a CFL should be rated at between 800 and 2000 hours with the higher power units (100W) rated at the lower limit.

    Incidentally I also discovered the thermal fuse incorporated into all LED lights never comes into play (and if it did would most likely start a fire)!

    My concern, therefore, is that LED lights may have the same issue - the LEDs may far outlast the drive circuitry associated with them. Perhaps the author of this article, in future reviews of (expensive) LED lights might wish to examine this aspect of their performance?
  • badkat7 - Sunday, June 14, 2015 - link

    Apologies for typo. Meant to say "The root cause WAS down-rated components"
  • badkat7 - Sunday, June 14, 2015 - link

    Also meant to say "the thermal fuse incorporated into all CFL lights". I am having a dyslexic day!
  • leopard_jumps - Monday, June 15, 2015 - link

    PSU rated at 560+W should be banned ! The aim should be power efficiency ! Power efficiency must be introduced and processors like FX 9590 should be stopped . Of course , new AMD mobile chips are quite welcome e.g. FX-8800P ! 500-550W PSU is enough to power a beast PC rig with i7 + GTX 980 Ti .
  • leopard_jumps - Monday, June 15, 2015 - link

    Sorry , the article is about a bulb but my opinion is a thing to think about .
  • PassMark - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link

    You did a review on a light bulb, but failed to measure the three most important aspects. The amount of light (Lumens), the quality of the lights (CRI) and the distribution of the light (angle). I won't even mention flicker, humming, RFI, lumen depreciation & dimming (with external wall dimmers).

    Instead you post misleading Lux and CCT figures from a mobile phone. Does anyone think a mobile phone is going to give accurate results?
  • taltamir - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link

    Now I can fulfill my dream of making it possible for someone to hack my lights /sarcasm

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