This always annoys me. How can a device you have purchased outright with certain functionality, have the terms of service changed after the point of purchase which then changes that usage of the device.
This seems like you could return for refund as the device is NOW not what you originally purchased.
Where does this end? We buy a car then 5yrs later they change the terms of service and if you don't agree you don't get the right to have tires on your car.
Until something is legislated, this will continue to the end-user's detriment.
I bought some Philips Hue bulbs In something like 2015 which have worked mostly fine ever since, but the control surface has become more and more intrusive over the years. I'm now relegating the bulbs to dumb use until they finally die.
I have completely swapped to just normal LED dimmer switches.
I live far enough out in the country that we get brown outs for less than an eye blink. Every fucking light bulb will shine bright like a diamond and there is no way to turn it off.
I've tried setting the 'Power On' Behavior but it just ignores it for these scenarios. It's so maddening to wake up at 3 AM with every light on having paid hundreds for light bulbs I 'own' but can't command.
It's a good feeling knowing that my basic non-internet connected car can't receive an OTA update to make me start paying a subscription to use something I already have just because the company decided they want more money.
I feel that at the very least, the customer in that case should be entitled to a complete refund of the product, regardless of whether they bought it 5 days or 5 years ago and regardless of the condition their device is in.
This should at least give some incentive to companies to not perform such sweeping changes to their terms of service and if they do, the customer can more easily remove themselves from the lock-in without taking a financial hit.
Just did that. Most work was flashing the correct firmware onto the zigbee stick and now I have transferred almost all my Hue and Ikea lights. Except for those farthest way from the stick, they seem to be unable to join.
If anyone got a hint how to join these without moving the lights (screwed to the ceiling) or the stick (integrated in my server cabinet), I’d be grateful.
Philips was supposed to allow local only, that was a big draw over WiFi-bulbs that are 100% cloud dependent. If hue really is phoning home without permission, I’ll replace their hub with a zigbee dongle on my HA server.
Connect your lamps to the cloud now. Because we value your privacy. Your lamps will not work without the cloud. But because we value your privacy, we collect neccessary diagnostic data such as
Lamp on and off times
Lamp color
When the sexy-times preset is used
How often you use your bathroom light
We will use this data to sell you Philips Avent baby bottles 9 months after sexy time, when the bathroom light started to be used in shorter intervals but more often as if by a pregnant woman who needed to pee more often but shorter, Philips oral shower when your bathroom light wasn't on long enough to floss in the morning at least 3 times last week and a Philips vacuum cleaner if the lights never got bright enough so you'd see the dust buildup, thus you probably didn't vacuum, disgusting little customer-person. All of that because we value your privacy.
I guess I could keep buying them and sticking them on my zigbee network, but I should probably get off the Hue train before things get worse. The issue is that they're just amazing bulbs and I can't find a competitor with similar light and color tuning. Are there any comparable options yet?
I wouldn't say they're great; they're adequate. There's a lot of issues with the bulb firmware that still needs ironing out both with stability and feature set.
I have a nice mix of Hue and IKEA bulbs in my house, running on zigbee2mqtt. The IKEA bulbs are solid and I've had no major issues, but I did notice their smaller E14 bulbs had an annoying faint buzz sound when they were off, so they got swapped out for hue bulbs.
But as long as you're running zigbee2mqtt or some other hub I would still consider hue bulbs as an option.
I don't use Home Assistant but this is still saddening to see. Hue was always my favorite to recommend to tech folks because of the local API being pretty easy. I'm sure that will go too. Lifx was another favorite of mine but don't work in my new house with multiple wifi APs with the same name. (I got a shitty little extender with a different name and use them in my basement.) Wiz is cheap but to my knowledge there's no public API so I have no idea if it works with Home Assistant.
@JackbyDev@hillbicks Philips Hue works with the zingbee protocol. You can integrate every single IOT in #homeassistant or you integrate the hub. I use the internal #zigbee protocol with the #conbee usb stick and it work flawlessly. With zingbee you can use also other IOTs from different manufacturers like IKEA or osram or some Asian brands. Just have a look at the Homeassistant homepage for all existing integrations.
Hmm, maybe. Depends on the infrastructure they put up. If there is a separate domain for the telemetry, then you can block it. Still no guarantee that it still works though.
The app will need internet access to login though. That really is a cat and mouse game that is not worth your time I'd say.
I liked having the full Hue ecosystem because it meant that I could tinker with HomeAssistant and the lights wouldn’t stop responding during restarts. I also already have a cloud account from the pre-HA days so that’s no big change for me but…
I think he's talking about having a bridge separate from home assistant vs using the zha integration. The former setup will let you control your lights when home assistant is down, the latter will not.
I just moved from the former to the latter and it's life changing lol. Added bonus of moving to z2m is binding devices directly to other devices inputs, like switches and motion sensors.
I just got a Filohome (tuya) dual switch and used tuya-cloud cutter put ESPHome on it. When setup with ESPhome it will still work even if HA is unreachable ok WiFi is down. I never even downloaded their app, made an account, or signed in.
Note for anyone trying to do the same, the Filohome triple switch device in tuya-cloudcutter will work to load the initial boot firmware but you need to change the yaml config when you install ESPHome. If anyone wants the yaml file let me know.