
Bluetooth LED bulbs - uggedal
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43722.html
======
petra
I'm curious why the chinese don't build open-source friendly stuff. They
already sell mostly commodities. What's there to lose if someone builds stuff
for you ?

~~~
pjc50
Their stuff is more "gongkai":
[https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107)

Because it's so cheap, nobody's going to make the effort to translate the
documentation into English and put it on the Internet. But on the other hand
if you go there and ask in Chinese you can get quite a lot of information.

~~~
petra
It still sounds like something doesn't work quite well . The Chinese in
general doesn't have a maker culture, a free open-source culture.

On the other hand, just translating the documentation of this led lightbulb
interface would have taken very little time, and would have probably created a
nice app that would appeal to western buyers and increase sales.

Maybe there's an opportunity for some site to make this process happen ?

~~~
voodoomagicman
It's my impression that the Chinese have more of a maker culture than almost
anywhere else - it's a country full of people who grew up in villages and have
now built factories and started companies that manufacture most of the world's
stuff.

~~~
petra
From an interview with a chinese maker[1]:

"There are almost no Chinese makers in Shenzhen doing it purely as a hobby.
I’m pretty active in the community and I have not met them.

Our makerspaces — the few real ones we have — are primarily for educational
purposes. We have a couple of places with laser cutters or a small 3D printer
for the kids to learn on, but there’s no place you can go swipe a card and use
real machine tools in the middle of the night like lots of other major cities
have.

...

As far as most Chinese people’s thinking, hobbies are for old people. If you
have seen newspaper articles about actual Chinese makers — who have made
homemade robots, dialysis machines, submarines, prosthetic arms — they are
nearly all older or retirees. Young people in China just don’t have the time
or freedom usually.

...

On the other hand, if you are working on a hardware startup or just want to
get stuff made, then sure, I think Shenzhen is pretty unbeatable[for making]."

[1][https://exolymph.news/2016/07/05/sexycyborg-
shenzhen-3d-prin...](https://exolymph.news/2016/07/05/sexycyborg-
shenzhen-3d-printing/)

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DiabloD3
"Oh hey, a post by mjg59 involving IoT devices, this should be good."

mjg59 never fails to disappoint.

~~~
sevensor
Every one of them is a gem. It's amazing what people will do to get a terrible
product to market.

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rollulus
BLE is king for hobby tinkering. You can even re-use the common and dead cheap
NRF24L01+ radio module with some hacks [1].

[1]: [http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-
bluetooth-l...](http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth-
low-energy-with-a-cheap-nrf24l01-module/)

------
dekhn
If you want to play with Bluetooth Low Energy and devices, your best bet is
the Arduino 101. It includes BLE and a nice, simple API to handle BLE
characteristics. Combine the 101 with a MOSFET attached to digital pins,
running the BLEFirmata sketch, and you can remotely control a number of high-
power LEDs from your phone.

------
crottypeter
Why is wireless necessary? Isn't ethernet over power a more obvious solution?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePlug)

~~~
legooolas
That's exactly what X10 does, but it's fallen out of favour in recent times.

(I've not used it so I couldn't say why)

~~~
JoshTriplett
I used to use X10. Then I discovered the hard way that buying low-bidder
electronics that plug directly into mains power is a really bad idea: one of
the control boxes that plugged into a wall outlet started to get hot enough to
create a blackened spot on its label.

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raverbashing
Oh "encrypted", and of course it uses AES ECB mode

Probably enough to tick a box though

~~~
jfindley
That is the _least_ of the problems with it. It's very, very odd. On top of
the craziness Matthew notes in his article, the code actually appears to use
ROT13. Twice. I have no idea why.

------
impostervt
I'm interested in making a door movement sensor with a remote alarm to wake me
up if my sleepwalking daughter goes roaming.

As a software person who is just getting into electronics (played with a
particle photon, just bought the Make: Electronics book & component kit to
learn), what are the options when you want to have two pieces of hardware
communicate inside a house?

\- Bluetooth - limited range?

\- Wifi - requires you to join each piece to the network, seems a
hassle/expensive for simple electronics.

\- Xbee - expensive!

\- RF transmitter/receiver - seems cheap, but maybe distance is limited and
there may be a lot of noise?

Anything else?

~~~
slig
Look up the ESP8266. It's a very cheap piece of hardware that you can program
using the Arduino IDE. It can connect to your local WiFi easily and send a
push notification to your phone.

So you can build something like this using a simple PIR sensor + ESP8266.

~~~
gpribeiro
Just made an account to say this and you beat me to it.

I built a garage door opening sensor using an ESP8266 (connected to my home
wifi) and a magnetic contact switch. I'm also using TelAPI to send me SMS
messages every time the garage door is opened.

It is very simple to do, and kind of cheap.

~~~
andrey_utkin
Could you please share any existing sources (schema, firmware)? Thanks in
advance.

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StavrosK
What a coincidence, I just finished making my wifi-controlled RGB LED strip:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg)

I'm currently writing this up, but I'm loving the fact that I can integrate it
with games, and I want to add some more. Next goal is for my living room's
lighting to pulse orange or blue depending on which team scores in Rocket
League. If anyone knows how I can hook into the game to get various pieces of
info, please let me know.

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joshgel
Here is someone else who reverse engineered a slightly more complicated WiFi
based protocol:
[https://github.com/beville/flux_led](https://github.com/beville/flux_led).

It's pretty well done, though he also has these magic numbers around that he
couldn't quite figure out what they were there for. I used this and hacked an
amazon button to control my home lighting and it works great.

All these seems like more argument to standardized IoT.

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floch
i've been tinkering with the misfit bolt which is a bluetooth bulb, and some
fella (@fayep) posted that on my GH repo last week:
[http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_inter...](http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_interface_v1.0.pdf)
\- this seems to be common to several implementation of bluetooth bulbs as the
bolt works with these specs. couple implementations for these:
[https://github.com/fayep/bolt](https://github.com/fayep/bolt),
[https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-
blue](https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue),
[https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-
bolt](https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt) (last one is mine, largely
inspired by the two above)

------
post_break
I love my Wifi lifx bulbs. Amazing output, low latency, and the standby usage
is 0.7w when off. My biggest complaint is there is no physical switch to turn
them on and off. Using my phone is slower than a switch, and if I switch them
off they won't be able to come back on with my phone or IFTTT schedule. 0.7w
seems low to me for standby.

~~~
stephengillie
What if wall switches were replaced by very simple phones...or even watches.
It would effectively be running the one app all of the time, defaulted to the
lights in the room. There could even be some sort of hard-wire bus between
this switch and the bulbs, to communicate through RF interference.

~~~
jmiserez
Or just use something like the Philips Hue Tap [1], which sends an RF signal
(ZigBee) solely using the energy from your button press (no batteries).

[1] [http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-
tap-...](http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-switch)

~~~
post_break
I wish this would work with LIFX. I refuse to go to Hue but man I want a
physical switch.

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unwind
The 0x56 that is shown as the first packet data byte when setting new
color/intensity is ASCII for 'V'. Perhaps for "Value"?

Always fun to theorize about hidden names, considering that somewhere somebody
probably reasoned themselves into picking 0x56 over the other values.

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userbinator
I found the use of a simple binary protocol rather unexpected but pleasant; it
is reminiscent of I2C. Given what the software industry is like today, I was
actually expecting some ridiculous combination of HTTP, JSON, SOAP, XML, or a
similar level of bloat... for once, it's good to see some down-to-earth sanity
here.

