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About LinkBacksI thought that was just for Pride season?Originally Posted by ik9000
I thought that was just for Pride season?
Am I reading that right? £130 for the two-Tower starter kit. £60 each for additional towers, so £250 (plus, don't forget £5 shipping).
And .... ummm .... why?
Petty lights?
Okay, I admit, I have wifi-controlled LED overhead dimmer lights. And they are colour-temp controllable, but white. And a couple of Alexa-controlled Phillips Hue bulbs, again dimmer but white. But they're functional, and didn't cost anything like that much, including two 3rd Gen Echo devices.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
I hope it will gonna work
iCue is the single worst application it has been my misfortune to come across
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
surely you're not saying these otherwise pointless desk lights are simply to show gay pride?
This is for people that want what you have, but without having to know anything about wiring domestic lights or messing around with Alexa (Amazonz stealz ur data) and anything like that.... and who may also want some additional colour in their lives (mental health wellbeing).
It's pure plug & play.... just badly done and way overpriced, is all.
Only because you have not yet tried Gigabyte's RGB Fusion.....!
iCUE itself is probably the most comprehensive and capable RGB software around, but is hampered by Corsair's proprietary connectors, and it requires a lot of time to painstakingly assemble each LED change for each LED effect, one at a time, millisecond by millisecond.
This is how come there are people who offer (for sale, or for free) hundreds of pre-built iCUE profiles and patterns.
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You don't need to know anything about domestic wiring to do what I've done, either.
The WiFi lights come with a simple little remote. Four individual "channel" buttons and an overall power.
Installation? Take standard bulb out. Put WiFi bulb in. Job done. It's precisely as complicated as changing a blown bulb.
Configuring WiFi remote?
Turn on bulb at switch or wall socket. Within a few seconds, press and hold one of those four switches I mentioned. After a second or two, bulb flashes. Job done.
That remote now controls the bulb or bulbs set to that channel.
The difference is, perhaps, why I went for these. It's pragmatic. I needed the remote control.
As for Alexa, installation basically does much the same as above, given that you have a (suitable) smartphone and the Alexa app. It's a little trickier, but not much, and the instructions can be read in about 1 minute.
As for Alexa stealing data, and taking that at face value, I guess Amazon now know when I turn bulbs on and off and have a sort-of insight in my musical tastes. I wish them luck exploiting that.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
You said you had a dimmer switch on the main overhead. Does that no longer mean turning off the mains and doing some rewiring of the light switch, while making sure your choice of bulb is suitable for variable current....?
As for Alexa, I don't actually believe you have one.
Coming from the guy who won't use Steam or anything else that requires giving out personal data, the idea that the same guy would then invite into his home one of the industry's biggest players in tracking your every move and then spamming the pants off you (pants available for £4.99) with tailored-content adverts..... well, it's just completely lacking any credibility. In fact, it'd be more believable if it was a Special Forces tale written by Chris Ryan and starring Ross Kemp!!
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Jonj1611 (06-07-2020)
On the first bit, no.
The bulbs I use (hard or impossible to find now) are simply either bayonet (E22) or Edison Screw (ES). So they work in any light fitting or lamp that uses B22 or ES. bulbs. I have four in overhead lights, i.e. 2 bulbs in each ceiling light, and two ceiling lights. And, one in a table lamp.
With the bulbs, you need either a little remote control, or a WiFi bridge that links them in as part of a bigger system. I just use the remote (about £8). There is an overall on/off on the remote, and then four rocker switches, one for each of four "channels".
I have overhead light 1 controlled by rocker 1, overhead light 2 by rocker 2 and the table lamp on rocker 3.
So, rocker 1 controls 2 bulbs, as does rocker 2. I could have controlled each bulb in, say, light 1 separately, and been able to dim or brighten them separately, but I wanted to dim the whole fitting, not each bulb.
So ... 4 channels. Each can control one or multiple bulbs.
Whichever rocker you used most recently is "active". The remote also has a 4-way rocker that does up/down, or left/right. The up and down brighten or dim any bulbs on the active channel, while left/right adjusts the colour temp, i.e. Blue-White to yellow-White.
The wall switch, or online switch on the table lamp can be used to remove power from the light fitting, in which case, the whole bulb/remote thing stops working, just like a normal light would with no power. (*)
If we were replacing the wall switch with a (manual) dimmer wall switch, then yes, you'd monkey with wiring. I've done that in the past. It's pretty simple but NOT for anyone that doesn't know what they're doing.
There are also WiFi dimmer systems where you do indeed replace the wall switch (whether simple switch or manual dimmer) with a WiFi dimmer, and then use normal bulbs.
But for my system, the dimmer circuitry is internal in the bulb, and sealed. Any user that can replace a blown standard bulb can fit this, and the only exposure to electricity is to a pair of AAA batteries in the remote.
(*) For purists, the ceiling rose may well have power going to it even wwhe the switch is off. Power generally goes to the Rose permanently, and then to the switch and back, using the switched live to turn fitting on/off.
But you have to take the ceiling rose cover off to get and those and you do not do anything at all tto the rose to fit this dimmer system.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
I get why you would think that. I'll drop you a PM later with an extra point or two.
But I now have two Echo devices 3rd gen Alexa), a standard Echo and a Dot. Several lights are controlled by them. They're Hue bulbs but White dimmers, not colour changing. I've just added Alexa-enabled wireless headphones (Sennheiser Momentum 3). I can wander round the house and indeed some of the garden with those, listening to just about anything. I have Amazon Prime (at the moment) as well as Music Unlimited (hence listening to anything) and Kindle Unlimited. And I'm on .... umm .... my fourth Kindle. Tempted by the new-ish one (Oasis?).
The Echo's have what boils to a Zigbee mini-hub sufficient to run Phillips Hue bulbs but if you want much more in the way of home automation it needs a separate Zigbee bridge.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
@Saracen999 if you got a way to contain personal data from amazon, please drop me a hint or two on PM plz
I have iCue, and like a fool, forgetting the issues I had getting it to install last year, I hit the update button.Only because you have not yet tried Gigabyte's RGB Fusion.....!
iCUE itself is probably the most comprehensive and capable RGB software around, but is hampered by Corsair's proprietary connectors, and it requires a lot of time to painstakingly assemble each LED change for each LED effect, one at a time, millisecond by millisecond.
This is how come there are people who offer (for sale, or for free) hundreds of pre-built iCUE profiles and patterns.
The installer hung at 65%.
Killing the process in task manager, left windows installer service running, and not able to be stopped. It also wouldn't allow the machine to reboot. Only a hard reset would regain access to the system.
This left a half installed application, which did not appear in the Windows Control panel. The only way to uninstall it was to boot to safe mode, then use Regedit.
I tried again. This time the installer recognised my peripherals and popped up another download/update box. I tried that method as well. The installer hung at 65%
Another hard reset, and this time I ensured that all other drivers were updated, and that all non-essential hardware was unplugged. (2nd SSD and optical)
Installer hangs at 65%
I tried an old version of CUE that I have previously had success with. Installer hung.
By this time the only way I can get the headphones to work at all, was to recover from a back up (April) and allow Windows to install it's own drivers.
So now I have a functioning but only Stereo head set, and the profile I saved to the keyboard and the mouse just is stuck at default.
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
If I had, I'd shout it from the rooftops. Sorry.@Saracen999 if you got a way to contain personal data from amazon, please drop me a hint or two on PM plz
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
I presume you've tried clean-installing all the latest drivers for all the Corsair kit, and then tried clean-installing the latest iCUE?
But hey, at least you haven't had to reflash BIOS and completely clean-install Windows, so iCUE is still doing better than RGB Fusion!!
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Yep - did the whole update everything then clean install - Nada
I did have to recover from a system image because it messed up the boot. So close
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
Absolutely agree there, I had a Gigabyte board with that awful software on it, was a pain to use.
Only because you have not yet tried Gigabyte's RGB Fusion.....!
Now I have a MSI board and a Wraith RGB cooler, for which I am using the coolermaster software for it.
So now I just let MSI Dragon Centre and Coolermaster Wraith software fight it out to who is controlling the fan RGB.
On start up dragon centre is controlling it then coolermaster software loads and takes over, at some point something must tick in the dragon centre and it takes control again and so on and so forth.
Jon
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