I don’t understand this doohickey. It turns on the lights via voice command or upon receipt of a signal through the Internet. That much is abundantly clear. But what is turning the bulb itself on? Is the receiver located in the base of the bulb itself, or does the consumer have to buy a separate, specifically-designed fixture, which contains the receiver? Or is the receiver located in a separate, specifically designed wall switch? They don’t make this clear in their advertising literature. And if the bulb does indeed receive the signal, what if I don’t like it or it doesn’t suit my needs? Can I buy a separate, specifically-designed fixture (or hypothetical wall switch) that would enable me to use the bulb of my choice? I see that there are 453 answered questions about it, so logic demands that I start chewing through them page by page…
The bulbs have a built receivers and transmitters, which communicate with the white box. It uses a wireless protocol designed for household gadgets like this.
Not to be too paranoid, but there is currently no standard for wireless transmission between these devices and the internet and ‘hacking’ is known to happen. Here is an example but there are many others.
The devices are referred to as the Internet of Things. Try searches on that term and you will find additional information.
Bob
Just go to smarthome.com and build your system…
I use Z-wave and the Razberry to control my lights remotely.
Those are the older models that require a hub. The bulbs communicate with the squareish Philips hub thing, which uses your router’s wifi to talk to a Philips server somewhere, which talks to the app on your phone. OR you can use Amazon’s Echo device which talks to Amazon’s servers which communicates with Philips’s servers which then communicates back to your router and to the hub and to the lightbulb.
The newer smart bulbs like this one take out the need for a separate hub (each lightbulb itself connects to the internet) but works otherwise the same. I have one for use with the Echo and it works super well, especially in movie rooms where you don’t want to walk across the room to fiddle with the light in the dark.
Sonofabitch…so every bulb receives its signal directly from your router and has its own IP address? Or at least, the Echo device has its own address and communicates with each bulb using a proprietary, non-IP protocol? I pretty much want to use voice activation. Can the Echo handle this seamlessly? For example, if I say “hallway light,” or “kitchen light,” or “stairwell lights,” will it do what I want it to without choking?
Yeah, each bulb is a wifi device. Works great with the Alexa! You can either control individual bulbs or group them into sets (living room lights, kitchen lights, etc.)
You’re right—works beautifully with Alexa. So far I’ve only replaced the light over my desk, but I’ll eventually replace all six bulbs in the entrance hallway with the TP-Link bulbs you recommended. It’ll be really nice to feel safer and more secure when I’m walking through the door juggling two dogs and five bags of groceries, and it’s pouring rain outside with ice on the ground to boot. Does anybody know why the price suddenly skyrocketed, though? I paid $20 for the bulb, but a few days later I went back to the Amazon page to see if there was a discount if I bought an entire box (there isn’t), and the price had suddenly jumped to $36. What gives? At $20 a bulb, six LEDs burning for five hours a day would pay for itself in just a little over two years. But at the new price, it would be almost double that. Still, there’s not too much to complain about if they really last 20 years (has Consumer’s Union or anybody else put this to the test yet?) the remaining lifespan of the six bulbs would represent a savings of about $1200 in electricity.
The $20 one (50W equivalent) is out of stock from Amazon. Wait a few days and they should get more. Other vendors are price gouging because it’s a relatively new product with high demand (the first mass-market smart bulb that doesn’t need a separate hub).
There’s also a slightly brighter version (60W), a tunable white version (you can change the color temperature from warm white to cool white), and a full-color version. Those are all more expensive, and I assume you’re not looking at those.
PS if your primary need is just to have the lights turn on when you need them to, I find that the motion-sensing LED bulbs like these $10 ones work great with unenclosed ceiling fixtures. I just walk into the room and they turn on, turning off a minute or two after I leave. I have one on the porch as well, and as soon as I approach the door it comes on.
I do have a couple of the dimmable smartbulbs for the home entertainment room, but the hallways all have the motion sensing ones. Simpler and cheaper, and no waking up the house at night just to go to the bathroom (by talking to Alexa).
Yes, she is a bit loud, isn’t she? :dubious:
Jeebus—everybody wants these things! After waiting about a week or so, I was finally able to obtain two more for use in the entrance hallway to the house, which had been and still is my primary interest—not so much for convenience’s sake (although admittedly that’s incredibly nice), but the safety aspect of being able to turn the lights on with my hands full, either by hollering to Alexa as I’m coming through the door, or by turning them on with my phone before I get out of the car. They had exactly two left in stock, and I bought both of them. That was about a week ago and they’re still backordered on Amazon. Once you have them, you’ll easily understand why the demand for them is so high. It probably took longer to open the package than it took to install them. All you have to do is screw them in, turn them on, and 15 seconds later your router sees them and tells the Kasa app on your phone that they’re there. All you have to do is give them names and tell Alexa about it, and you’re in business. They rate at least a nine+ on the ‘geek factor’ scale. My wife has started to refer to Alexa as “my girlfriend.” It took all the strength I could muster not to say to her “you can be replaced, you know.” (The wife, not Alexa.)
So… sixsteps to turn off a light? (voice to Echo, Echo to Amazon, Amazon to Phillips, Phillips to router, router to hub, hub to light bulb).
I honestly hadn’t put much thought into such a setup. Aside from the coolness of being able to remotely control lights, right now it seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Plus of course the hacking concerns. I wonder if a hub-based system mightn’t be better for security than the individual bulbs - easier to upgrade the hub’s software at least.
Or, do all the individual bulbs also require the Alexa or whatever? If so, I guess that gadget would also be updateable.
We’ve decided we’re not getting such a gadget anyway until they change them to allow us to rename them. Jeeves would seem to be mandatory for such a toy.
Pish Tosh, they had this 30 years ago, and it was wireless too. They called it The Clapper. 
I still have one that I can’t use anymore. Clapping twice triggers the glass-breakage alarm on my home security system.
So does dropping my keys, which I seem to be doing too often lately.
There are two broad categories here that maybe I wasn’t clear about?
- Hubbed models like the Philips, which is what you’re describing (Bulb -> Hub -> Router -> Philips -> Amazon)
- Hubless models like the TP Link bulbs (Bulb -> Router -> TPLink/Amazon)
It’s irrelevant how many hops there are from the bulb to your phone/Alexa as long as it works quickly. The whole internet works on this hub-and-spoke model. When you say, “Alexa, lights on”, they come on 1-2 seconds later. It’s even faster if you use the app to control the bulbs directly (since you don’t have to wait for Alexa to voice recognize you).
It’s certainly something that’s only situationally useful. I only use it in the TV room, with the Fire TV (which also has Alexa voice recognition), to turn the lights on and off when we’re watching movies. For that it’s a godsend.
It’s not something I’d go way out of my way to get, but I was in the process of replacing all our incandescents with LEDs anyway and this was only a little more expensive. The rest of the house uses motion-sensitive bulbs, which are wonderful in hallways, and for my purposes, more practical than having to talk to Alexa all the time (she CAN be loud at night, especially if someone was listening to music earlier and left her volume up). Usually any command results at least in 1) an initial “I’m listening” chime and 2) “OK” to confirm that she heard you, or “Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you said.” The motion sensitive lights just work, no thought or repetition needed. They each have their uses.
The thing about Alexa overall is that I just wanted a speaker at first – Alexa, play Pandora, or Alexa, play my weekly playlist thingy from Spotify. And then our household gradually grew to use her for other things (Alexa, buy more toilet paper; Alexa, what movies are playing tonight, etc.) so “Alexa, turn on living room lights” just became an organic extension. We didn’t think much about it, just started using it like any of her other features. The thing about the GOOD smart devices is that they just get out of your way and work when you need them to; it’s much easier to deal with the lights this way than to fumble around in the dark looking for the switches, tripping over bikes and dogs and whatever else is lying around.
I understood the difference, I just wasn’t sure whether the individual bulbs (i.e. the hubless variety) required something like the Alexa.
It sounds like you use it with one, but someone who didn’t have the Alexa: could they use it just with a smartphone app?
I definitely see the “cool” factor either way. Right now though, the whole Internet Of Things situation is just taking off and the security concerns - which the vendors are largely ignoring - are very real. Urban1a mentioned this earlier in the thread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/technology/why-light-bulbs-may-be-the-next-hacker-target.html
I’d been thinking that the types that require a hub might be more secure but the first link specifically mentions the Phillips line (which HAS a hub).
Yes. In fact that is the first step to setting up the light bulb: getting it to work with the independent app. Only then can you (separately) add it to Alexa. Once you do that, you can control it both from Alexa and from its own smartphone app (in this case, “Kasa”). You never have to add it to Alexa if you don’t want to; you can keep controlling from the app only.
The app works much quicker than Alexa, in fact. A slider lets you instantly (with no noticeable delay) turn on/off the light and adjust its brightness. Alexa takes 2-5 seconds to enact your commands.
I’m not a security professional, but ZigBee is far behind wifi in popularity and security. It’s very popular as a home automation protocol, but has nowhere near the ubiquity of wifi. To be able to attack wifi-only smartbulbs (such as the TP-Link) would require not only breaking vendor-specific layers (like what happened with Philips) but also the universal, industry-standard wifi over WPA2 that everyone everywhere uses. An attacker would first have to get through your home router (and possibly its “stateful firewall”, as an additional security measure, which ignores random incoming connections from addresses that your light bulb hasn’t recently talked to).
ZigBee doesn’t go through a router like that, so any attacker within range can initiate a connection to your ZigBee light bulb directly. They can’t do that to a WiFi light bulb unless there’s some undiscovered secret command to initiate a hardware reset on those things (usually it requires you to turn on/off the bulb with its hardware switch in some secret pattern, almost like morse code).
TLDR: WiFi light bulbs should be reasonably safe for the time being. ZigBee too, unless you have rogue hackers driving around your neighborhood trying to hack light bulbs. While a theoretical attack vector, most hackers (especially international ones) will look for low-hanging fruit like wide-open internet cameras that run unprotected directly facing the internet, not something that requires specailized equipment and physical proximity like your ZigBee bulbs or something that requires traversing home routers like the wifi bulbs.
Are these WIFI bulbs on IPV6? I’ve been avoiding them because my home automation is slightly more sophisticated, but if they’re IPV4 only, I’d worry about running out of IP addresses on a typical home network.
Sure, 253 addresses seem like a lot, but I also get anal about assigning static addresses to certain function groups and types of equipment.
Don’t forget we’ve got tablets, phones, PC’s, smart TV’s, stereo receivers, other smart hubs, Sonos speakers, additional Wifi access points, and all kinds of things taking up our precious IPV4 space!
So retool your home RFC 1989 allocation* to use 10.0.0.0/8 address allocation and revel in 16.8 million available host addresses.
*Assuming you can. Most commercial home routers hard-code DHCP for a 192.168.x.0/8 internal network, but if you run a DHCP server off another device, you can configure it how you need. My in-home Linux server is my home network’s DHCP server, for instance.
From a few weeks ago:
The “hackers” are among the founding fathers of on-line cryptography:
…The experiment, carried out by four researchers, Eyal Ronen, Colin O’Flynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten, focused on simple Philips Hue wifi-connected smart bulbs and showed how the bulbs can “infect each other with a worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction.”
“The attack can start by plugging in a single infected bulb anywhere in the city, and then catastrophically spread everywhere within minutes,” the researchers’ paper said.
Their paper: IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction.
The ZigBee protocol manipulated.