6 Comments

This is an exciting idea. Happy to hear more products coming along. The seperate company is brilliant too!

Expand full comment

I generally love and own a ton of your products, but I am disappointed by the strong anti "smart" stance. To me I want as much automation as possible, especially for things like lights. I don't want to have to go flip a switch, I want my lights to automatically switch into night mode for me. Like I have my Skype portal set to automatically turn on to help wake me up in the morning and then automatically turn itself off.

If it's a lamp with multiple modes, I want an easy way to automatically trigger between those modes, without forcing me to go open it up and wire in an ESP 32 or something similar.

Expand full comment

Appreciate the reply and your perspective. I suppose I actually do agree with it, and my premise is perhaps more that it is rather tricky to get smart devices to have zero drawbacks. To really provide a good user experience, we would need to develop our own cross-platform app, in addition to the hardware, as well as thinking about how to handle multiple room control, possibly with various motion sensors. It is not a simple UX/engineering problem, and it is well beyond the resources we currently have, but maybe someday.

Expand full comment

I 100% agree, you guys trying to create a good smart platform and tying in motion sensors at all that would be an extreme amount of work and absolutely nothing you guys should be trying to do.

The modern approach is instead just provide the hardware interface:

Use off the shelf, open source: for example there's now a number of "manufacturers" that will sell a smart plug that's preflashed with esphome or tasmota.

You can have these set up to pretend to be a Philips hue or lifx bulb for easy control, or you can tie it into home assistant or practically anything else if you want to create advanced full home control.

There's a number of "manufacturers" out there that sell pre-flashed smart plugs with ESP home or tasmota, or more advanced devices like the msr-2

https://wiki.apolloautomation.com/books/msr-2

(This is an example of a hardware device that includes a large amount of sensors as well as outputs like an LED and buzzer, with everything being open source and easily controlled elsewhere)

The advantage of this is your bom cost is minimal, it's a esp32 or similar, just your hardware controls can be controlled via software if desired.

It hasn't been a feature I've wanted in any of the Chroma devices I already own, because those have all been simple on off switches, which is easy enough to just put them on a smart plug. But for example your sky Portal that switches between white and red I'd buy a few of those today in case those had software control, not just mechanical.

Tldr: I hope you guys never waste engineering resources on multi-room control and motion sensors, focus on the stuff you guys are amazing at, putting out lighting products that help our health!

I'd be happy to discuss any of this in a lot more detail, you guys have my info.

Expand full comment

Exciting! Look forward to them!

Expand full comment

I would buy the new lamp in a heartbeat. A few for the office as well. The environmental fanatics have been trying (and often succeeding) to erode our quality of life for a long time now.

Expand full comment
Error