-1

I've bough these lamps: lamp 1, lamp 2

After turning the light off with the switch, not the remote control, my lamp forgets it's color, brightness settings. Plus it turns on with a random color/brightness which changes randomly between turn ons. Is this the case with all dimmable lamps?

I'm kinda upset, since i made a whole lot of effort to have 2 switch for this lamp. The whole point was to have a switch next to the bed, so you don't have to climb down from the elevated bed platform.

Ferenc Dajka
  • 111
  • 2
  • 1
    This is in some language other than English. What does the instruction manual say? Do you have an instruction manual in English that you can link to here? – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Sep 27 '23 at 22:12
  • 3
    As this is anecdotal, it's not an answer, but I have three different varieties of LED illumination with inline switch for brightness and color temperature. When used with any form of external power management, the setting is lost. – fred_dot_u Sep 27 '23 at 22:32
  • That's the way most of those work. The makers assume you will only ever use the remote. Or your phone, or Alexa or Siri or Google... – Ecnerwal Sep 28 '23 at 00:10
  • 1
    Nice-looking lamps too. I would replace the driver with one that did what i want. You could probably hack the existing unit in a few ways; use a small battery to keep the MCU on while unpowered, wire all 3 mosfet gate signals to the one switching the LED chain with the color you like, so that all 3 modes do the same color, or just replace it with a dumb driver that turns on and off at the wall; same time every time. – dandavis Sep 28 '23 at 22:50
  • @dandavis could you explain the first option in more detail? – Ferenc Dajka Oct 04 '23 at 08:13
  • 1
    They sell 3rd-party LEDs drivers that would replace the one it came with. They can provide new control options or be really simple. If you have a dimmer switch, look for one with "triac dimming". If you want alexa or whatever, they will mention that too. It looks like there's a lot of void space in the lamp to accommodate a large range of drivers. I don't have room here to fully explain how to pick a suitable replacement, that's another question, and it might have been asked already. If not, ask it and i'll tell you more than you want to know. – dandavis Oct 04 '23 at 22:53
  • @dandavis hey, I asked it in an other thread: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/283306/can-i-just-replace-the-led-controller-of-my-lamp?noredirect=1#comment590189_283306 – Ferenc Dajka Oct 16 '23 at 12:29

1 Answers1

2

That's a limitation of the circuitry of that "smart" hardware. It could have been designed to record its state in something like flash memory and recover that when it powered up again. But that would have cost more, so the manufacturer chose a circuit which doesn't have that feature; it loses its memory when it loses power.

You could try to find fancier hardware which has the additional non-volatile state storage. Emphasis on try.

Or you could not use the wall switch. Maybe tape a remote to your wall. It'll still lose memory if you have a power outage. You could even install a wall-mounted smart switch and use it just as a transmitter, ignoring it's output and wiring the circuit as permanently on, then have your smart home logic respond to the switch by sending a signal to the lamp... though if you were going to go in that direction I'd have installed the smart switch normally and plugged in dumb lamps.

keshlam
  • 27,539
  • 5
  • 46
  • 94
  • The cost to storing settings like this in non-volatile memory is non-trivial. Right off the bat you'll now need some micro-OS to handle writing and reading of data, and then you'll need both code and a controller to use those data and set the device to whatever the data wrote. – Nelson Sep 28 '23 at 01:13
  • Most of those components have to be in the smart device anyway -- but every feature added means possibly having to upgrade to a slightly more powerful microcontroller, or add external components. Which may only be a fraction of a cent per, in bulk quantities, but when you're making millions of the widget that adds up. (I really hate that edits after a few minutes require delete-and-repost, but SE thinks that's necessary. Grumble.) – keshlam Sep 28 '23 at 08:55
  • anything smart (using wifi or bt) will already have flash memory onboard to store wifi SSID and other config. It's hard to get micros w/o flash or at least eeprom these days... – dandavis Sep 28 '23 at 23:09
  • @dandavis: But these aren't "smart". And even smart IoT devices get devices sized for that particular product, rather than overkilling it as hobbyists generally do because for a one-off the component price is so much smaller than design and build costs. – keshlam Sep 29 '23 at 00:42
  • Can I just replace the LED driver? Can you recommend something? This is the current one: https://img.istreetview.com/?id=hsF0gw05&url=3cRltBdhUaYc2lJ275Ez4NhqjMmC+vaqAQ4m3zXbsrDDGm94YNcv67oTZnzqzskrAM6BnSdWhIaxHknimPYxlJjEjnT+5ml1vytmWw== – Ferenc Dajka Oct 03 '23 at 09:33
  • 1
    Maybe, if you can find one with the right specs that you know has the right behavior. No, I can't recommend one. – keshlam Oct 03 '23 at 13:09