WaffleMakerMan: will they overheat?

Much to the chagrin of retailers, between 11 to 20% of the millions of consumer electronics items purchased weekly will be returned to the store. (source: Accenture) At that clip, consumer electronics have the highest return rate of any product (even above apparel). And it’s costly too. In 2011, consumer electronic returns cost retailers close to $17 billion. (source: Accenture)  You may be asking yourself why the return rate is so high for popular gadgets. As it turns out, patience is a virtue.

Most gadgets returned to the store actually work exactly like they are supposed to, but are brought back due to… impatience. Yes, most of those people returning gadgets have spent an average 20 minutes (source: Technical University of Eindhoven)  trying to figure out how to work a gadget before giving up, getting frustrated, and returning it to the store or online outlet they purchased it from. Another factor for returning a product is buyer’s remorse. While it is easy to impulsively buy a gadget in the store, guilty feelings often bring someone back into the store. Whether it’s buyer’s remorse or product frustration, billions of dollars of consumer electronics merchandise are coming back to retailers in functionally and cosmetically perfect condition.

netspanner: Some months back I bought 2 lights and a controller. One light 'whistled' a high frequency, and was annoying, and the wattages are too low to use in anything but a desklamp. They are now consigned to the bottom of the wardrobe.

Brighter better lights would make it an interesting toy but until then its not very practical.

bongojona:...

I have often thought about walking through my house and having the lights follow me as go

bongojona: hmm I don't see a point in wifi bulbs to save a few seconds of getting off the couch to hit a switch

Unless you can set them up to turn automatically when someone enters a room/opens a door ? that might be useful

I have often thought about walking through my house and having the lights follow me as go

RmACK: I have a similar setup to qyiet and tchart but with a couple of twists. 
In the morning, a timer turns on the hallway light just before anyone gets up and puts my bedroom lights on dim just before my clock radio turns on in the morning. They get brighter every minute as I wake up with the radio, until the 2nd alarm (beeps) on my clock radio goes off, by which point it's too bright to go back to sleep and I get up.

After everyone's go to work times, the hallway light goes off by timer.

Regardless of the timers, when I leave the house, my bedroom lights turn off as soon as my phone drops off the wifi and when I come home, as soon as my phone joins the wifi, my bedroom & hallway lights both turn on. 9 times out of 10, the lights come on before I get as far as the hallway to drop my bag off in my room.

When others who have bedrooms off the hallway come home, their phones joining the wifi also cause the hallway light to turn on and timers repeatedly set it to nightlight mode during the night, so if someone comes home late, it won't stay on all night. I'm thinking about getting an RGBW for the entrance hall which would go to different colours as a way of greeting different people, (regular friends included!) but the RGBW have very monotonic colours that make it hard to see when taking off your shoes etc. Would be better if we could mix white with colours, more like the output of Philips Hue.

I've used a database to schedule timed events via a web interface (they can be set to repeat automatically) and a 1minute cron job executes scheduled tasks and queries the wifi over snmp for a list of client mac addresses. 

Finally, I found that my wifi bridge tended to drop off the wifi quite regularly,  so ripped out the wifi module and linked the remaining zigbee board (that talks to the lights) to an arduino with ethernet running some code that emulates the wifi bridge so that the official apps work transparently through it.