Philips Hue bulbs are randomly turning brightness to 100%

That's what I'd like to do after a hard day of dealing with terrible technology: troubleshoot my light bulbs. Just picture it: the baby is crying, the wife is upset at you because your light bulbs aren't working correctly. You're logging into some web interface, googling, and power cycling. They could have been built better, your versions of out of date and cannot receive firmware updates. Nothing's working, so you're driving to the store to buy normal light bulbs. I only hope that more devices are only available as "smart" devices.

Src: retired electrician

Tip: I never recommended to any clients that they "lock in" to any one vendor's ecosystem (e.g. no computers within lightbulbs; no touchpanels) when rewiring their homes; stick to simplicity (e.g. no ceiling fans which operate via [losable] remote)!

The wireless switching protocols are among my least favorite household ecosystems ("smart home" stuff). I have seen 90+ year old switches which still work perfectly, while the 5 year old "latest-greatest" geekswitch gets firmwared out of operation.

Add it to the list of reasons that I don't want a computer in my lightbulbs. I know a lot of you have had fun creating the smartest homes and there are definitely some legitimate use cases. But mostly I just want an inexpensive LED bulb in the usual color range that will last a pretty long time, and I can control with a switch. Generally I would rather have a smart switch than a smart bulb.

We talk about inflation a lot these days, but not too much about simple things being over-engineered to the point we can't afford them anymore. And companies apparently have little incentive to produce real budget options anymore.

The theory is that a recent Hue firmware update is causing devices using the Matter protocol to experience a connection disconnect, which is interpreted as a power loss, which triggers the "on power restore" behavior. A firmware update is expected.

In my apartment in Japan the living room light came with a remote and I can easily dim it, turn it on or off, or set it to a dim night light. Having only used traditional switches I have to say it's very convenient especially in bed. It certainly feels a bit less likely to go wrong than a smart home.

That said I wired my mum's house with smart plugs and all the lights go on when she gets home and off when she goes to sleep, and she loves it. She's 72 and reaching down to toggle all the switches is getting harder for her. The plugs work via WiFi, so basically any software can control them.

Just today a friend who sold their house couple weeks ago told me this: they had an internet-connected Wi-Fi lawn irrigation system. After selling their house, they had their internet service cancelled. Along with it the Wi-Fi system turned off of course. The irrigation system loosing the internet connection decided to turn on the irrigation with nobody able to turn it off as the new owners had not moved in yet. The lawn promptly flooded with water flowing to the street for two days straight. A worried neighbor called and the buyer's agent had to go to the house to manually turn off all water in the house. So much for smart IoT systems...

Lot of people seem to feel personally attacked in this thread.

Technology born of capitalism is destined to be bug ridden hellscape: I currently have a yeti microphone on windows 11, i believe due to old/missing drivers pre-company resale, it constantly unmutes itself. Randomly crashing and default is unmuted perhaps? purposeful microsoft privacy busting perhaps? AI audio processing thinks hearing sounds means i want it to unmute? who could ever tell now?

"we have identified an interoperability issue [..] in which random temporary radio traffic disruptions are incorrectly recognized as legacy switch power toggles"

Yeah right, this is some nice BS. These lamps are driven by Zigbee, Please explain to me how "random radio traffic disruptions" are able to disrupt a protocol that has built in proper AES-128 encryption.

At least they're not EVs going full throttle.