Lamps are too smart if they can do this
Seriously. Why can’t they be just lamps?
A Hungarian engineer decided to challenge himself to make a video game run on some off-the-shelf, cheap consumer device, without adding any extra component. He basically succeeded with… this Ikea “smart lamp”:
Yes, it does seem that a $14.95 “smart lamp” from Ikea really has enough electronics and computing power inside to run a classic PC game:
And this means two things:
- human beings are very, very clever
- sometimes too clever for their own good
That [lamp] exists to let humans, at last, “choose between 9 colours - and dim so you can adapt the light to different activities, for example a warmer light for dinner and a brighter, colder light for working… without a wired-in installation”.
Cool. But is it cool enough to:
- justify even more polluting by electronic components, along the road?
- justify that it “can ONLY be used with IKEA Smart lighting products”
As a micro game console, that Ikea LED bulb may be a smart purchase. As a smart lamp, it’s not so smart.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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