Criss Townend, Thanks, I'm investigating Philips TSMC etc. Idaho Lighting Solutions, they still exist today. This was the only company that did produce them for Philips, 120 volt only, never a big seller it was. But a great learning cycle for Philips HUE, that why they used them!

what chips did these have inside of them? PICs?

@@summerlaverdure there was an ASIC internally designed, a triac, and a couple various surface mount caps and resistors. Beacon light paid an outside contract for the silicon wafer lithography and sawing, die attach and wire binding was done all in house.

@@VidarStorm ah cool, thank you for explaining! i was about to fork out $20 to find out for myself and now i dont have to ^O^

@@summerlaverdure It would be totally destructive exploration. Everything is on a small ceramic substraight reflow soldered in a brass cup. Once the die attach is done with the triac and ASIC, it gets wire bonded. After electrical test, is the reflow solder of the micro ceramic board into the cup, then its carefully filled with resin not only to protect whats inside, but the bare wirebonding on the ASIC and Triac pads to the board. The resin ensures they cant short out causing premature failure. I will look to see if I have one in my way back time machine pile of stuff.

That’s what I was thinking. Wall switch timers were still rather expensive then and cumbersome so value wise it seems like it would make the most sense… Unfortunately, I’d guess it’s also the one people would have had the hardest time understanding how to use, with timer bulbs being so new.

the first once is still a feature with some led bulbs and fixtures, fliping the switch in short secession changes the color temperature.

The problem is if the power goes out you lose it completely and have to set it again, with a regular timer there's a battery that keps the time

Especially the dimmer. The fact that it resets is not a good idea. One would think that if you want a dimmer you normally want it to be dim.

Well except that you would want it to go on at different times in summer and winter.

Would you please make a video about the bulbs you have?

@@Lachlant1984 Absolutely; been in the plans for a few months now. Don't know when I'll get to it, but it will definitely be done.

A mash up of Canada and Idaho! me gusta.

@@HappyDiscoDeath I don't understand your comment, would you explain that please?

@@Lachlant1984 The Maritime Girl is in Canada, and the chips in the light bulbs were invented and manufactured in Idaho.

Actually, if you read closely on the package, it says "lumen equivalent to." Incandescent bulbs become less efficient the dimmer they're run, so at its "40 watt" setting that really consumes 65 watts is likely putting out about 400-450 lumens, like a standard 40 watt bulb.

@@Wyatt_James Indeed. An inefficiently running, under-volted bulb will also last longer. But unless it's cold outside, it will be a waste of power of course. I mostly run incandescent bulbs only in winter anyways. Ironically the infrared from those bulbs is quite efficient as heating even if it's not much.

Current five-dollar chinese wattmeters are quite good with odd power factors. I don't have any triac regulators around to check it, but they appear to be spot on with bridge rectifier loads.

@@Wyatt_James Good catch on the "lumen equivalent" fine print.

@@westelaudio943 . Ive gotten so used to leds these days.. when i refurbed my halogen 300w t3 flood.. i forgot about the crazy amount of instant warmth they put out

You might be buying another sooner than you think. Many of the modern bulbs seem to be built down to a price rather than up to a longevity standard. Five out of six Philips LED bulbs failed within about four years. The first of their replacements failed a couple of months ago. I took it apart and the capacitor inside had overheated.

@@MrDuncl oh, I believe it.

as a person who uses powerline adapter, you got me curious about that input filtering cap issue. The router on the receiving side gets cut off sometimes, can it happen because of the input filtering caps of the other devices nearby?

@@proCaylak could definitely be related. You can try unplugging unnecessary devices that are nearby on the same circuit and plug them back in one by one and see if any trigger it specifically. Most common devices to have input filtering would be anything that sends or receives a signal, so in addition to PC power supplies, TVs, audio and video receivers are the most likely to have the capacitive input filtering that is prone to causing issues with powerline networking.

It's just cheap Chinese switch mode power supplies. Use an AM radio to track down which device is creating a ton of interference and unplug it. In my case, it was a $20 Target DVD player. I still have X10 devices and they still work fine.

I, personally, can't verify the problem with power line. Modern power line adapters are designed around typical noise levels. The only problem they have or connections over multiple phases.

X10 sounds very similar to what Hornby were doing with their Zero 1 model railway controllers in the late 1970s. Interestingly I just read that that was based around TMS1000 four bit microcontrollers.

What if this “bulb extender” technology had been built onto lamps? Obviously the one that you mount bulb in and then put it into the socket would have been more practical since people often have many very nice lamps they don’t want to replace.

In the '80s they did sell inserts to extend the life of light bulbs, at the cost of losing some brightness and causing the bulb to not fit as snugly in the socket. But when CFLs and longer-life halogen bulbs became commonly available, they were discontinued.

@@vwestlife makes sense. Interesting.

It isn't in the bulb manufacturers interest to sell you something once which means demand for bulbs will halve though!

I wish he'd drop his beard and hat.

I just commented the same thing!

7

I have some of those, SceneSwitch is the branding for them I think. They actually work pretty well, I like having cool white when the sun is up and warm when it's down, and these got me that in my ceiling fixtures without having to deal with any "smart" nonsense. Only issue is that one time one got out of sync with the others, probably due to a voltage dip or something...

True but in my experence, nothing dims like a halegeon or incandescent bulb, leds you can't quite get that nice low warm candle light glow a filament bulb provides when put on a dimmer switch.

@@wolfietigerstripes3248 Yup! That's because LED's don't produce light using blackbody radiation principle. White LED's are actually deep blue or UV chip with a phosphor covering it to convert it to white light, so it operates the same way as fluorescent bulb.

@@wolfietigerstripes3248 Technology Connections is a big fan of Philips "Warmglow" bulbs that mimic that using different colour LEDs.

There apparently is some market for similar bulbs here in india except now they are using leds. These are still selling well here. There is also another variant which has a lithium battery and they call it inverter bulb or something.

@@simplygame5530 Ah, interesting. I know BigClive reviewed a bulb with a battery in it, the bulb was designed such that it would operate in a power outage and the standard wall switch would turn the bulb on and off even when operating in battery mode, he explained how that worked, but I couldn't understand it.

It's interesting how also either the OBEX function which was a big deal for Bluetooth in mobiles kinda died off; or it's just modern compression techniques stuffing so much into such a slow protocol. You can stream spotify to your headphones via your watch in a decent enough quality, but try sending an actual file without using a WiFi backed thing (i.e. Airdrop) and welcome back to the dial-up paced part of your childhood you actually don't have nostalgia for.

Yes, you have to watch out for that, especially when buying these bulbs on eBay. I tried to get one of the 30-minute Auto-Off IQ Lighting bulbs, but every one I saw had some generic bulb stuck in the package -- until just recently when a real one was listed, too late to make it into the video.

Update: finally found one! It's a dimmer unit, seemingly unused, from a ReStor. Neat bulb! It cost me 50 cents. The most surprising thing to me is how robust the packaging is; it's much beefier paperboard than the usual light bulb packaging.

The schematics are shown in the patent.

@@vwestlife Yeah, but I want to know also how they managed the power supply for the electronics, and also I like how he explains the schematics and his opinions about how it's designed.

I'm interested in how they keep the state present for at least 10 minutes when the power is off, especially in such a small package before the era of ultra low power microcontrollers

@@Leurak In the 1980s I had a Casio calculator that would remember its memory contents for minutes if you took the battery out. What they are trying to do isn't much different from a digital watch and they run for years on a tiny battery.

Not so much amazing if you consider that 14W/h costs same money now as 100W was worth back in the days and fact 90s was beginning of the end of free energy we should rather cry not be happy about it. There was a time though when CFL's were popular you could save money a lot i also was like your grandpa. Now it;s more like.. you have no other choice. Mine mom sits all day using IKEA 5W desk LED while im no longer bother turning it all of and on agani, have motion detector adapter E27 but still using small halogen lamp 20W on desk. Cause only this light makes mine eye to feel comfortable but i simply cant afford to use lightbulbs all over the place it's not because i love LEDs so much everywhere. Use f.lux app on laptop to make LCD less annoying when i switched from TC1100 to Elitebook i could not stand it's light felt tired after an hour. I for some unknown reason had no such problem sitting in front of CRT. Not convinced to color other than 2700K they used to make even LED all that same 3000K look alike. And so.. old style light bulb is something wont ever get obsolete halogen is still manufactured. Money is not only factor. Most of us went blindly to accept new, even if it was not that smart, not that good, not that.. efortless because we didn't know these things ever existed. Now we have efficient, smart, internet of things and energy crisis.. and cold war again. Amazing isn't it :)

@@KabelkowyJoe but I think sometimes it isn’t all about money. the more efficient bulbs use less energy, ie; less fuel burnt to produce the same amount of light. not just that, but the heat released on the operation of the bulb is also significantly lower. it matters a lot specially for hotter places. and since we have limited coal and limited resources, the increase in electricity prices was inevitable. they will keep going up until we can harness a powerful unlimited source of energy (which I think we might be able to, using nuclear and sun). until then, I think you’ll have to manage with warm white LED bulbs :D