So I’m not too keen on whipping out my mobile phone, finding an app and adjusting the brightness. Seems clunky to me. I’ll miss the buttons in the dark and its frankly not easy. I am just as likely to dial 999 or switch my bed into vertical mode as turn the lights on!
I’d like to a have a hardware knowb that I twizzle it probably plugs into the mains and is permanently linked to the bulbs.
Like a two way switch I want to be able to have several knobs control one bulb or one knob control several bulbs or several knobs control different aspects of a bulb or group of bulbs.
Here are some typical use cases - At the moment using conventional triacs - both me and my wife have dimmable bedside lights. But then she goes to sleep and I want to dim or turn off her light as well as control my own. Or we both have knobs. Furthermore the knobs could be programmed to traverse any colour line on the 3d colour-brightness chart either an open or closed (perhaps circiular) path.
But there is a problem. For two dimmers to control the brightness of 1 lamp (or more) its necessary to be able to send incremental commands. Not “set the brightness to 62%” but “set the brightness up 1% on what it was before”. This way, if two streames of data come in perhaps changing different aspects of the light characteristics then it all just works. +1% now then -2% then a bit later +4% it all just works.
This is not difficult to do but the current protocol does not support it so far as I can see,
A simple change, perhaps using one bit of the reserved byte in these commands.
Please could we have this?
A hardware dimmer for lifx bulbs would be a neat piece of kit and is not hard or expensive to make. Shaft encoder perhaps with switch, wifi enabled embedded processor with wifi, small power supply, Hold the switch down for say 30 seconds and after that it permanently links with all bulbs that are turned on in the next minute, its very simple. It could have a major effect on LiFx bulb sales or be a brilliant product in its own right, and might seriously increase the value of the market!
But you need to have the incremental brightness control (and other characteristics really) or it wont work. No, you cannot read the bulbs current state and then adjust it: two knobs doing that at the same time would get the wrong result!
I am very sad this was not thought of before. Or maybe it was and the documentation is not telling? Or maybe my brief reading of thr protocol docs missied something.
?