To buy or not to buy. The $142 offer ends today

[JDRoberts]

If you turn the GE bulbs off via the nonnetworked wall switch, you won’t be able to turn them on again via the motion sensors.

Much discussion of this in the forums, the challenge of smart bulbs is that they need to always have current.

At my house, we solved this with the Amazon Echo, which is now our primary means of controlling the lights, plus the SmartenIT 3 toggle switch.

Internet of things for non Internet of spouses/children

To be politically correct: “spouses,” not “wives.” My mom is the computer science professor, my dad has no tech skills whatsoever. (Hi, Mom! LOL) Anyway, there is an option for each kid’s room if you want to go to the trouble, and you just want button control inside the room rather than for kids on the go… you get a cheap android tablet, should be under $50. You install a version of SmartTiles or a similar dashboard app and install only the devices that tablet has access to. You wall or desk mount it in kiosk mode inside a frame that doesn’t give them access to anything else. http://www.smarttiles.click/ The following picture is from a similar community created dashboard by florianz. Again you would limit the tiles in each room to the ones that kid is supposed to have on/off access to…