Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices Philips is replacing Hue Bridge Pro devices after a software update left several units bricked with no way for users to restore them. Rumblings began in forums in June after a seemingly innocuous update left users, quite literally, in the dark. After a few weeks attempting to resolve the issues, Philips has thrown in the towel …
"Equipped with a new chip capable of running complex algorithms and AI-powered features, it's faster and stronger than ever."
But clearly not clever enough to realise when a firmware update will brick the unit.
I guess this AI does not have a sense of 'being' and self preservation.
"The incident highlights the risks associated with smart homes and their devices. Support could be abruptly pulled, the device's origin might not be what you expect, or, as in the case of the Philips Hue Bridge Pro, a firmware update could leave a device hopelessly bricked."
You forgot my personal pet peeve... smart home devices that randomly decide to log you out, invariably at the most inconvenient time.
Dumb home: flick light switch, light comes on
Smart home: open app (of several apps because no two vendors' devices seem to share a common one); "sorry, you need to log in"; aaaargh what password did I set for this app several years ago?; make several attempts to remember it; get locked out; request reset email; wait 30 minutes for email to arrive...
Progress, eh? :)
Or my Honeywell thermostat:
"I see you're using the Android app!! Great!! Let's delete your current configuration and get started!!"
NOOOOO! [as my laboriously set up heating/cooling schedule vanishes]
It was replaced a unit with a COOL/HEAT/OFF slider and +/- buttons for the temperature, plus it met Mr. 64oz Sledge.
I feel this is time to retell my favourite old joke about the "smart home"
A man visits the showhome for the latest and greatest Smart Home, equipped with voice control and robotic assistance
The salesman boasts that this house will do anything - Anything that you ask for via voice command. "Try it out!" he suggests..
So the man asks.. "Make me some dinner!" And the house whirrs into action and some robotic arms begin cooking up a meal.
"Make the bed!" And the bed flips over and is immediately furnished with new plump pillows and bedding
Close the curtains! Play some music! Everything he asked for was instantly catered for by the smart house
And the man looked about in amazement at this marvel of technology, and said: "Well.. Bugger me.."
I did once have one where the rocker leapt out onto the floor after I operated it, leaving all sorts of sharp bits of metal for the next user (luckily, no contacts exposed).
I've had a couple of houses where I've had to move them as they were installed behind the door when it was opened to enter the room. Current house has the light for the stair lights over the other side of the room. I guess it was "designed" by the same architect who thinks cars can make right-angle turns to avoid the pillars in car parks...
The "smart bulb" really is emblematic of the over-engineered and unreasonably complicated state of IoT devices. It's a bulb, that produces light. Why does it have to be an entire robot? Even if you wanted bluetooth functionality, why is the microcontroller the sole dictator of what the light does instead of just being an auxiliary control mechanism? Why does a bad firmware update completely prevent me from even using it manually? Why does it even need firmware updates? What the fuck changed about turning on a goddamn light?
If 2001: A Space Odyssey got one thing right, it's the spaceship that only worked through voice commands and had no manual overrides outside of physically disassembling the computer controlling it.
I have given up complaining (well, about smart home devices). I want none, I have none, I will have none. To me, they represent the apotheosis of widget engineering: someone has an idea that sounds good at first hearing, and the marketing team and coloured pencil department completely ruin it, overloading the design with 'features' and other addenda that end up turning a light switch into a member of a million-device botnet.
I don't disdain those who have found such devices useful or essential - but for me they're neither. I have never been inconvenienced by the inability to remotely control a radiator or change the colour of a light, and to be honest I never expect to be. Obviously, I'm not the target market.
Now... who do I talk to about removing all the 'driver assist' idiocy that goes into new cars?
> Now... who do I talk to about removing all the 'driver assist' idiocy that goes into new cars?
Some are useful, on our current car it avoided me doing a rear end shunt caused by being distracted.
But they should assist only, the trend seems to be going into "control" mode which is too far. The driver should be able to decide that some features are "off" and stay "off"
A recent rental decided on a country road in the wee small hours that I was approaching a completely unlit small village with a 30mph limit, and that I wasn't slowing as fast as it liked. So it slammed the anchors on hard enough to break traction and trigger the ALB, and simultaneously - because who needs main beams in a built up area? - ruined my vision by dipping the beams.
Truly we live in an age of wonder.
I've been saying this for nearly ten years and I'll keep saying it: We need an industry standard, open source, vendor agnostic, fully secure by default IoT protocol to control these things. Once we have that, there is no logical reason to have any third party's protocol, and linking devices together to manage and control is simple and straightforward. The only issue then is how badly any given vendor implements their security in the relevant App provided, but with it being open source, there will be multiple ones created which will be fit for purpose.
Well, if you were to use Home Assistant in your smart home, you can use a zigbee switch to turn on a z-wave light, and at the right time of year, also turn on a few strings of christmas lights attached using a variety of protocols - I've got "matter", "TP Link Kasa" and z-wave and zigbee devices, all linked into home assistant rather than their own individual apps. - and none of it is reliant on manufacturer support any more.
Well, if you were to use Home Assistant in your smart home, you can use a zigbee switch to turn on a z-wave light, and at the right time of year
Philips has at least answered the question "How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?". Sort of, because the light bulbs are ok, they just bricked the hardware. Vendor lockin keeping home owners in the dark.
But it's something I've been pondering while slowly working on my 'smart' home. That's mostly been around HVAC, and being able to automagically shunt heat and power around. Which is mostly something that can & is done with simple PLAs or FPGAs. But then suppliers make that more complicated by deciding we need a PC to 'manage' those, or a server in the 'cloud'. So then every other Tuesday, we lose the ability to turn on the heating, AC or lights because MS is down. Or the Internet. Or your mobile network. Or you lose your 'smart' phone. Yey, progress. Or there are commercial BMS with DIN-rail modules and a SOC, with a display panel and once configured, it should just work.. Plus some fun, like living in our cars, sort of given there's a ton of CAN bus modules that have been developed primarily for vehicles, but can also be used for building & industrial automation.
I think this is where they're trying to position the Matter protocol, but it given what it's trying to do it feels unnecessarily complicated. For very, very large values of complicated. It's also ****ing irritating to search for - of all the possible names in the world, they chose a word already in very common use. Thanks for that.
But your analysis of the problem is 100% correct: the vendors pushing smart products are all operating under the presumption that you're only going to buy their stuff. This is the #1 reason why "smart home" is not a boast, it's a punchline.
Personally I've rolled a system around MQTT and simple JSON messages, with lots of standalone scripts forming bridges between the MQTT network and various proprietary bits of hardware. After 30+ years in IT it's actually the architecture I'm most proud of - I can remove, change and add scripts or reboot nodes, and the rest of the network carries on regardless. Like Home Assistant but broken up into many standalone daemon processes, and no python.
For professional embedded devices, we used a "minimum version" in the update package. Plus a field of applicable hardware.
If the running software was too old, the update had to be done in 2 steps.
One of the reasons was that some updates changed some internal data structures irreversibly.
The devices are not that expensive, but the replacement process is.
