Hacking and Disassembling Philips Hue Lights
Vložit
- čas přidán 30. 07. 2024
- We're hacking a Philip's Hue lightbulb. As always we're brought to you by www.PCBWay.com/?from=atomic
I've got a bunch of these Philip's Hue lightbulbs lying around so I thought it might be fun to tear one down and see how it ticks. I made quite a mess.
And then I thought - why not try and reuse the control PCB?
---
If you'd like to help support the channel and help me buy more nonsense - I have a Patreon page: / atomic14
And if you're shopping on AliExpress or Amazon then if you click on these links I will get a little bit of affiliate money:
Aliexpress - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_Ac05mF
Amazon - www.amazon.com/?tag=atomic14-20
You can also join us on Discord here: / discord
And we've got an exciting new newsletter! makernews.substack.com/ - Věda a technologie
Thanks for this. On looking at that teardown I feel it's about time that governments started forcing companies to make electronics far more repair friendly. Make it easier for repairers to take them apart for repair and so reduce waste and landfill. Of course it's not as easy as that though - many greedy companies want to sell more and have more control so they want to make things even harder to repair.
Very true. To be fair to Philips these bulbs have lasted 7 years with no problems. And the design and construction seem to be pretty good.
That potting is actually high quality
Well documented, good project.
I love Zigbee and Philips Hue lights. I put the retrofit can RGB downlights all around our house, outside, in the soffits.
I use a raspberry pi and Home assistant to control them.
They work flawlessly. Only con are the lights were 40 or 50$ a piece. They were worth it though as they are the only downlight that is RGB and uses Zigbee. Alibaba had a couple but they are junk.
We have Philip's bulbs in the bedrooms. They are quite pleasing, especially late night when dimmed and warmed. The Wiz apps are not very good.
That's one expensive hack 🙂
Yeah, definitely only worth it if you've got one without any use.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for taking a look inside so i dont have to :). Do you think it is possible to use all this to controll a led rgbcct strip? and if so where to solder it on to?
Thanks for the video! A heat gun will help you remove the plastic diffuser and soften the silicone. Just use caution as not to melt the plastic or electronics, just as you’d use caution prying. Speeds up the workload(and reduces frustration) by a noticeable margin.
Great tip!
The plier/can-opener/twist seems like a good technique
I just need to invest in some tough work gloves!
Have you done any teardown on the Hue candelabra bulbs? We dont like the bulb base that takes up the lower half of the bulb. Was wondering if a way to get the LED elements & electronics out, put the LEDs in an empty flame housing, if such a thing exists , and stuff the electronics down into the candle stem of the light fixture!
I hope you read this. I was wondering how you would go about using a hue bulb to make a non hue light hue compatible? Like one of those large daylight dimmable panels for example?
Glad I saw your video before wrecking a bulb
Could you turn all LEDs on at once for maximum lumens? What temperature white would you end up with?
you can see the rolling shutter on the moon lamp as you change it's color
Hi! I need to disassemble one of my bulbs for a project. can I run the bulb without housing in terms of heat? the socks gets very hot on a hue bulb. is the aluminum part of the housing some kind of heatsink?
Yes, it looks like the whole thing is designed as a heatsink. It will still work without it, but it might cut out after a while.
Video idea to test actual flicker rates of these bulbs. I suspect flicker is quite high as light is quite pleasant. That LED driver chip is expensive indeed.
Looks like the PWM signal is 1KHz - should be pretty imperceptible.
@@atomic14 Thank you! I suspect some modern bulbs are moving to higher PWM rates. We have some flickery ones too!
These bulbs and those 18650 metal stripes are really blood suckers. I just imagined you might harm your finger and then you show us that cut! 😮
I need to get some good work gloves.
1:10 yah, thats why I searched for a video tutorial for how to do it. Like say... THIS ONE
Nice video, interesting to learn that the Hue bulbs are properly constructed, although it's a pain to get inside them...about the moon lamp, which is pretty btw, couldn't you just have put the whole bulb in there from the start?
I was pretty impressed with the construction, surprisingly good. And yes, I did think at the end - hmm... Why didn't I just put replace the diffuser with the 3D printed moon... would have been much easier :)
@@atomic14 Oh well, it made for a great video anyways 🙂
At this point it is easier to just use esp32 running esphome to control the LEDs, because they cheaped out on only using one constant current driver chip, it is very hard to reuse
Hi I accidentally threw out the LED board with NTC sensor, because I wanted only connection board but now I don't get any outputs probably because of lack of the sensor. The board connects successfully with the app. Is there any way to bypass the sensor? Replace it with single resistor? and how to connect that resistor?
Definitely possible - The B & C pins connect to the thermistor. see the high res image here: www.atomic14.com/2023/05/04/hue-light-hacking.html a 12K resistor will probably work no problem.
can you show to replace the LED diodes(redundant)? can it be done? say or example, 5 years has passed and the Hue bulb goes bad. Can users just solder out bad LED out of the board then replace with generic LEDiodes. then it would be new again? instead of buying new whole Hue bulbs
It’s probably possible - if you can take it apart without destroying it. But it’s not really designed to be repaired.
Makes me wonder if there's ESP32 or similar firmware that'll act like a clone Hue bulb, and allow you to take the output and drive Neopixels or similar (Just all the LEDs being the same colour)
There's some interesting work here - peeveeone.com/zll-tldr/ looks like he reverse engineered the firmware!
WLED does exactly that, I believe.
@@mc.the_machine without Zigbee of course
@@zyghom true, although you could do something with enough programming work on an ESP32 C6 to have Zigbee with something like that. They are available now, but I wouldn't expect WLED to support anything like that for many years unless someone really wants to do the programming and take the initiative outside their core group. I think they are barely starting to support the S series now, and that's not even official, never mind the C-Series, never mind when that's brand new and isn't even supported by a final stable Expressif SDK. Still, I think it could technically be adapted to work with that with some effort.
@@zyghom you could also potentially make something like that work with thread on a C6, which, might actually be a much better fit than Zigbee, since thread is IP based and probably could readily be translated to using some of WLED's native protocols.
What is the PSU controller chip? Is the topology flyback?
It's interesting, there is 3 pin IC marked CFW that I can't identify. Everything else seems to be MOSFETs or passive components.
Where do the traces from the transformer go? Maybe there is a PSU chip under something?
@@atomic14 I don't see a PS chip anywhere. The U1 CFW may be a 3-terminal constant current source. And then this is a discrete design for a constant current power supply.
👍
100 ohms at 5v is 50ma, 3.2v=30ma. Driving LED from logic would normally be >=330R for safe high side drive. Sure it doesnt matter for hacking but best not to confuse the viewer.
Don't forget the MCU is only outputting 3.3V and you have the voltage drop across the LEDs as well, so you'd normally have around 1volt or less over the resistor. But you are right - I got my maths wrong - it's more like 10mA...
You LITERALLY hacked it!