So, in theory, one can park outside someone else's place in another country, and flash your lights at will, from the comfort of their own car seat.
New Bluetooth tech lets you control 4 BILLION lightbulbs at once
Are you in charge of 4.1 billion lightbulbs? Do you need to control each one of them individually? Yes? Then get your hands on the latest development from Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR). The CSR mesh protocol uses Bluetooth low energy with device-to-device communications to allow one bulb to speak to the next. The technology …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 09:39 GMT Tom 7
Re: Stuff this..
Have you not heard of the secret mandate: no new technology in a house can directly replace the old one. Bulbs grow slightly over time so all your downlighters have to be replaced with slightly larger ones that wont fit up against the beams.... Dimmer switches are redesigned so what looks like a drop-in replacement actually needs a new mains cable fitting to the spur and the recessed box replacing to get the wires 'round the back to where they are needed.
Its probably very easy to make an LED replacement for any bulb in your house but some-one somewhere will have made one and got copyright on it so you will have to replace the bulb holders and in some cases the whole wall the light was attached to.
Millions has gone into research to ensure that the boards the LED's are fitted to will fail after 2 years and a day and the whole supply chain modified to ensure that the new replacement will have a light temperature sufficiently different from the incumbents to piss you off.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 15:48 GMT Stevie
Re: no new technology in a house can directly replace the old one
Agree.
Because everything is now "digitally enhanced" and "Web Enabled" and therefore subject to IT-derived ideas about what need replacing when and with what.
Switch + volts + filament = light.
Digital Power Bus Routing Selector Module + Digital Variac Module Output + Gallium Arsenide Fitted Digital Support And Control Electronics For Domestic Illumination Module = remodeling project, endless requests to wait pending driver upgrade and pwnership by Chechnyans (who are likely in a different time zone even if they allow you to light your house), annoying high-frequency buzzing and light of exactly the wrong shade to be either restful or conducive to the reduction of eye-strain induced headaches.
Don't let IT nerds design things for real people. They are no good at it.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 15:06 GMT John Gamble
Re: Stuff this..
All I want at present is a way to replace existing 78mm 80/100W halogen bulbs with an equivalent LED
Yeah, the size equivalents are available1, but the brightest that I see from my supplier are 60W equivalents (heat build-up is definitely the enemy here).
Having said that, you may want to try to swap out one of your halogens with an LED anyway, just for the sake of comparison. I've found that halogens are not always as bright as claimed, and sometimes the bulb is brighter than necessary for the room or hallway anyway.
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1. Assuming a reflector type, the North American equivalent would be a PAR20, with half an inch to spare.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 15:27 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: Stuff this..
Thanks, John, but not what I'm after - the existing holders have a linear halogen R7s bulb which illuminates a shaped translucent glass (downwards) and the ceiling and wall (upwards). I'd like to keep the holders and drop something in, but I haven't been able to find anything. I'll even settle for rebuilding the back of the damn things...
Most 'lights' these days seem to be decorative features, not something to have if you want to do something like, say, reading. I want a room full of light, not tiddly spots, but I don't want to pay a couple of hundred quid a unit to do it.
<edit> Just tried a search by r7s and turned up this: http://www.simplelighting.co.uk/product_images/i/536/142754.99956c2735774f65c9bc31e62547dd7c390__79137_std.jpg which may not fit the slot but is worth investigating...
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 16:00 GMT John Gamble
Re: Stuff this..
Ah, interesting (I've never seen a bulb like that before, thanks). All I can say then is good luck -- it took manufacturers here years to get around to making the PAR16 equivalents that I needed, but they finally did, so presumably something similar will happen with your R7s.
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Thursday 10th July 2014 21:05 GMT future research
Re: Stuff this..
you could look here. http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=R7+led&catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20140710125304
I built a house an ended up buying 100 GU10 LEDs for £200 when I needed 70, I have had about 5 fail already, but cheaper than paying £10 a bulb in the UK. Mine where claimed to be 6W one but in they consume 3W to 4W, but I am happy with the light output of them.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 11:23 GMT TRT
Re: Why?
Well there will not enough address space for some Christmas decorations for a start, if the race for the world record continues.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 15:41 GMT Immenseness
Re: Why?
"LED Lights are supposed to last... well forever"
They don't. The LEDs themselves might but the cheap, rubbish, built in supplies last no longer than the average tungsten bulb in my humble experience. I won't be buying any more LED lamps until the power supplies improve. I'd like to see trading standards prosecuting a few suppliers for supplying LED lamps that don't last for the claimed 60 years, or even 1 year. How they can get away with it is outrageous. They are so careful to say the LEDs (which the average person will take to mean the whole lamp) will last a lifetime while no mention of the power supplies. The should be made to state the the expected lifetime of the whole unit including both.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 17:04 GMT John Gamble
Re: Why?
LED Lights are supposed to last... well forever...
An LED (and the bulbs made from them) will age over time, getting dimmer. Last I checked, a bulb was officially (U.S.) considered "dead" when it dropped to 70% of its initial illumination.
So far the outdoor lights, which are on continuously at night, are still doing fine, but they've only been in operation for two years so far. I think I can realistically expect another three years out of them, but we'll see.
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Friday 11th July 2014 17:57 GMT Stevie
Re: considered "dead" when it dropped to 70% of its initial illumination
Can't count the number of red traffic lights near my house with more than half the LEDs burned out, nor do any of the busses I've clocked in the last few weeks have a full matrix or redduns in the taillights that "last forever".
The Jeep that passed me the other day had a full bar of them so bright the fucktard behind the wheel had turned off his headlights (by which other people would have been able to judge the width of his car despite the dazzle coming from the bar of brightness mounted low and central - which conveyed a much smaller frontal area).
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 16:01 GMT Stevie
Re: I dont kwow why
[4 Arachnoid] X10 technology has been around in easy-to-consume form for a couple of decades, and at one time X10 modules, remotes, receivers and switches could be purchased from any Radio Shack quite inexpensively. I used the plug-in version for years, until the remotes wore out.
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Thursday 10th July 2014 15:01 GMT Stevie
Re: I dont kwow why
"They have, but most people find it easier to locate a light switch that is always on the same place on their wall than it is to locate a remote control, especially if it is dark"
Which is why the range included wall switches. Still does, but you have to source them from somewhere else now (the Radio Shack range was just rebranded stuff you could always get elsewhere).
There's this thing called "google" ...
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 09:31 GMT Talic
... "in a move that will please the green lobby, the switch can be run off a battery that, according to CSR, will last for up to six years"
These statements are dumb. If it takes six years to flatten a battery. How much mains power could it possibly use. Plus you don't have the environmental impact of battery disposal.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 09:54 GMT Bob H
the problem is that there isn't a good solution for low energy conversion of mains to low voltage without waste. Putting a battery in the solution reduces the bill of materials, complexity and energy consumption. You might need to replace a battery in 5+ years but that will cost you less than the energy usage from a mains converter.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 10:20 GMT Ben Bonsall
Solar panel -> 12v Battery -> 12v bus
Works fine for caravans and boats. Only need a backup charger in case of emergencies like 6 weeks of rain. Or an English summer.
Next time I wire our house there will be some kind of 12v and balanced serial bus cabling installed so lighting, sensors and switching need no batteries or wireless between themselves, and the MCP can live on a computer in the house with no access to the internet.
Could even have a 12v fridge freezer so the smart meter brigade can't turn it off :)
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 09:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
There is no Bluetooth pairing as the system uses the advertising channel.
.. thus ensuring that that advertising channel stays live to pick up all that new, lovely local marketing you have been breathlessly waiting for ..
No thank you, I rather like my technology paired, even if it is sometimes a pain in the proverbial. I like to hang on to that little bit of control I have left.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 11:13 GMT Richard 12
And if I understand correctly, no security at all.
The design appears to be that each lamp has a permanently-set "address" that's used to send commands to it. The QR code encodes this, much like the barcodes on some DALI fittings that contain their serial numbers.
The lamp doesn't have any way to verify that the sender of the command is authorised, so you can sit outside somebody's house sending commands to every possible address until you find the ones that are active.
On the bright side, it does appear that after spending a little while identifying them, you can play Tetris on the side of a block of flats without needing to bother the owners.
Apart from the whole "changing their lighting at random" bit, anyway.
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Wednesday 9th July 2014 14:18 GMT hugo tyson
The QR code/UUID is only used during installation
The QR code/UUID is only used during installation. After that the device has a 15-bit local ID, and a network key which was distributed securely during installation. Messages are signed and encrypted using that key. Up to 32k devices can share a network key and so interwork without additional bridging or gateway sorts of things.
So you can't control your neighbour's lights.
The QR code is used to handle the race condition when you and your neighbour are both installing a new light bulb at the same time - to keep you from accidentally acquiring control of each other's. And so you can tell which of your several exciting new devices is which as you give them IDs and set them up.
Group IDs are also 15-bit; each device can also belong to multiple groups and so respond to commands addressed to eg. "all kitchen lights" "all lights" "downstairs" &c &c. So long as they share the same network key.
The reportage about 64k groups each containing 64k devices, making 4bn, is, um, confused. With separate network keys, there can be billions of distinct mesh networks worldwide, each with up to 32k devices, without them interfering with one another.
Aside: the "advertising channels" name has nothing to do with pushing marketing messages, though many companies are looking at doing indoor location/proximity via BLE ads, and then layering push messaging on top of that using a separate server connection made by the supermarket-loyalty-card-app or equivalent.
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