We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: lighting

  • Look Mum, No Socket!

    My NanoLeaf NanoLight LED bulb from 2013 finally gave up the ghost: or did it …?

    A hand holds an oddly-shaped light-bulb. It is a regular dodecahedron (12 sides) but with five of the lower faces extended into kite shapes. The top six faces are regular oentagons. There are three white LEDs on 11 of the sides. All but one of the LEDs are glowing, despite the Edison Screw mount not being inserted into an outlet
    woo! spooky glowing undead lightbulb!

    The LEDs glowed for several minutes after removing it from the socket. I suspect capacitance is afoot.

    Although it was absurdly expensive ($45 [USD?]; that’s about $62 with inflation) when I got it from the original Kickstarter campaign in 2013, it has been run for several hours a day since then. I always liked the shape of the bulb, with its origami-like folds.

    Modern LED bulbs are much cheaper, but this one looks classy. The magic smoke has well and truly gone, and all that’s left is a faint glow and the stench of rancid phenolic.

  • goodbye X10, hello TRÅDFRI …

    scruss/ihsctrl: a package of bash scripts to control selected IKEA Home smart (aka “TRÅDFRI”) devices via their network gateway

    The old X10 devices were getting really unreliable: seldom firing at all, getting far too hot, bringing a whole lot of not working to my life. So while it was kind of cool to have my lights controlled by an original 256 MB Raspberry Pi Model B from 2012, it was maybe working one schedule out of ten.

    So it had to go: replaced by a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a whole lot of IKEA TRÅDFRI kit. I was deeply unimpressed with the IKEA Home smart app, though: you couldn’t use even basic schedules with more than one light cycle per day. So while I know there are lots of clever home automation systems, I wanted to replace my old cron scripts and set about writing some simple command tools. The result is ihsctrl: very limited, but good enough for me. It’s been working exactly as expected for the last week, so I’ll finally get to wade through 8 years of cobwebs and dismantle the old X10 setup. I already miss the 06:30 clonk of the X10 controller turning the front light on — that was my alarm clock (or alarm clonk) every morning.

    (old local copy: ihsctrl.zip)

    more up-to-date local copy:

    ihsctrl-masterDownload

    2025 update: this still works, if extremely slowly. It takes maybe 15–20 seconds for a command to get through. Sometimes it doesn’t. Retrying is good.

  • wind and solar … with heavy tree cover

    As seen in Birkdale Ravine: wind and solar powered LED lighting in an area with heavy tree shading. Not just any wind turbines, VAWTs, no less. In the words of Modern Toss’s Drive by Abuser, “How’s that working out for you, yeah?”