Nearly a year ago, I upgraded all of the standard incandescent lights in the house to Philips Hue. The Hue is an LED lamp that gives off a decent amount of light — 60 watt incandescent range.
The Hue can also be remotely controlled via ZigBee. The Hue starter pack comes with a hub and 3 lamps. The hub has an ethernet port (no Wifi) and communicates with the Hue lamps throughout the house wirelessly.
It works really well. Better yet, there is a full API for controlling the Hue lamps and, as a result, there are a couple of dozen apps for controlling the Hue for both iOS devices and OS X. As well, the fabulous if-this-then-that site can control the Hue lamps based on various inputs. Want to have the Hue in the living to glow red on a warm day and blue on a cold day? No problem. What the Hue in your office to glow red when $AAPL is down and green when it is up? Easy peasy.
Yet, unfortunately, I can’t really recommend the Hue as anything beyond a novelty. Not because of any flaw in the Hue itself as it is a fantastic product, but because of what is lacking.
The critical missing piece is Hue compatible light switch. For example, when I walk into the bedroom at night, I hit one or both of the wall switches at the door, and I expect there to be light. Similarly, when I flip the switch off, the lights should go off. Now, unfortunately, this — as expected — kills all power to the Hue. No amount of remote control is going to light a lamp that isn’t plugged in!
One possible solution is to use something like the WeMo switch. It can be integrated with if-this-then-that to turn on/off a Hue or set of Hues when the switch is toggled. Beyond being expensive ($50/switch), there is a 7 to 10 second lag between the switch being activated and the light state changing. That assumes, of course, that the myriad of moving virtual parts between the light switch and the light are all up and running.
Way too Rube Goldberg to be acceptable.
Another possibility would be to configure a web server on a computer to receive the WeMo input, then fire a command off against the Hue hub. This would, at least, confine the Complex Machine to our house, but I’m really not interested in adding yet another server that needs administration to my life.
Kickstarter Opportunity!
To complete the Hue as a home lighting solution, there needs to be a light switch optimized to the Hue hub itself. Ideally, it would communicate over Zigbee to talk directly to the hub, reducing the switch-light hop count to 1. The switch would leave the Hue always powered. While it could be automatically configurable, that really isn’t necessary. The Hue management app could easily provide a list of switches and lights. Toggle the switch and it highlights. Select which lights should be controlled by the switch and you’re all set.
Alternatively, there is definitely a Kickstarter opportunity here and no one has come close (there have been a couple of “TCP/IP switches” on KS, but they all go for the kitchen sink of features). The key is dead simple; the switch could be as simple as on/off. Even basic dimming isn’t really necessary. Just an on/off toggle that doesn’t power off the device it is connected to, but sends a command to the Hue Hub over Wifi (because Philips has not opened ZigBee interface). Only need a 2-way switch because 3-way could be done entirely in software and could be implemented as n-way. The switch could be Hue compatible primarily, but that pretty much implies that it is a TCP/IP switch. Configuration is an obvious challenge; a bit of a chicken and egg situation there. Unless something like WPS (Wireless Protected Setup) could be used to automatically configure the switch, then I suppose it would have to have a USB port or something.
In any case, keep it simple. Go for maximal cost reduction while still producing an attractive product. I’d back it in a heartbeat, as I expect would many Hue owners.
