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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

I was about to say the same thing.

I set up all my non-standard lighting fixtures with Lutron Caseta switches, and replaced all the standard bulbs with Philips Hue bulbs. They've both been working flawlessly, together, with my 3 HomePod Minis for about a year and a half now.

It really is a brand thing. Most are bad.

[edit] > My favorite aspect is that the pico switches can be programmed to switch whole rooms of lights on and off...

This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.

This meant I had to go with a bunch of Hue Smart Buttons, which do, but have a tendency of falling out of their homes and onto the ground.

Was looking at the Hue compatible RunLessWire stuff though. [1]

[1] https://runlesswire.com

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Philips Hue lights are sadly not on the same seriousness level as the Lutron hardware.

After a time away, I tried to turn on lights with my phone -- only to be greeted by a message like "There is a mandatory update available for your bridge. You can use your system again after 10 minutes". I found not being able to turn on the lights for 10 minutes because they were installing unprompted updates completely unacceptable, so that was my last day as a Hue user. I now use a mix of Zigbee bulbs controlled with a (stable, offline) zigbee2mqtt gateway.

Hahaha, oh my gosh, the future is here and it's awful.

I'm going to stick with my regular old legacy light switches and bulbs as long as I possibly can.

I have two hue bridges ( because I have over 60 lights) that have been working for a long time now and I have never seen this problem. It’s worked flawlessly.

I also have another zigbee dongle with zigbee2mqtt and zigbee2mqtt is what gives me problems particularly if the power goes out over the house.

One of the challenges is this - on one hand, we have the "IoT is notoriously insecure and manufacturers have or should have liability" argument, which is valid, and when manufacturers do actually release security updates, that should be lauded.

And then on the other we have the usability pain like this. I'd rather pay a few dollars more for more storage or an A/B firmware system so the upgrade can run async and minimize interruption.

Just don't use wifi. When the only firmware you need to update is in the MQTT bridge, the whole problem becomes a non-issue.

Zigbee or Zwave devices can have firmware vulnerabilities.

The attack surface at least requires physical proximity, unlike devices addressable via IP.

Mandatory software updates are not the problem. Having to restart devices to install any updates (plus the fact that it takes 10 minutes) is the problems. It's possible to engineer around that.

Lutron sells a pro bridge for the caseta that exposes the Pico over IP. Allows for easy setup with HomeBridge running on a raspberry pi.

I use a couple wall modules that don't plug into anything then setup a HomeKit trigger to bridge other systems. You can trigger the wall module from a Luton switch and that will trigger the HomeKit automation.

The hack is worth it for the reliability of Lutron. The Caseta system never fails for me.

> This is my only gripe with the Lutron hardware. The Picos can only be used to trigger Lutron devices. They don't integrate into HomeKit like the switches do.

They do if you use a “middleware” to tie together the systems like Home Assistant or HomeBridge. I raise and lower zwave blinds using a pico switch.

I just did a whole house with Philips Hue lights and the RunLessWire switches. Love the fact that the switches are piezo-powered. The downsides to them are the loud click they make and that you have to learn how to properly press them (with about a 200ms hold) in order to come close to 100% reliability.

They're actually not piezo-powered! That's an EnOcean switch module, it's generating the energy from a coiled wire. Clicking the switch loads up force in a spring mechanism and then releases it to move a magnet through the coil.

ArsTechnica has a look inside a similar module in the Hue Tap.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gallery-dissecting-t...

RunLessWire looks to be selling two variants of them, one with the same 2.4 GHz module as above for use with Hue, and another version for on/off circuit control, which would be 902 MHz EnOcean in the US.

  > you have to learn how to properly press them (with about a 200ms hold)

My water filter infuriates me to no end with this. Maybe if the switch were polled every 50ms I wouldn't notice it, but 200ms is so long for my otherwise patient composure that I prefer to drink the water from the tap.

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