Stuff I design and build and take apart
The LivingWhites adapter doesn’t really have many surprises. The only two notable things are that the entire high voltage side is from ST parts (VIPER16 , 2 x 14NM65N , ST1S10 ) and the other surprise is the other LED not in the manual.
The non surprising part is the CC2530 IEEE802.15.4 chip .
Here is what is inside the LivingAmbiance / SmartLink / LivingWhites (they should really use less of these trademarks) remote
On the left : a TI CC2530 a “Second Generation System-on-Chip Solution for 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 / RF4CE / ZigBee”
On the right : a Cypress CY8C2044624 a CapSense controller.
The CC2530 has the 2.4 GHz transmitter and reciever and a microcontroller for the wireless protocol. The Cypress chip handles the buttons and probably the LED’s and speaker (the big square on the right). The UX logic can be in any two of the chips.
The PCB has some capsense buttons that are not on the faceplate. I assume the same PCB is used for both the LivingWhites and LivingColors remotes.
In a clever plan to keep their customers permanently slightly confused, Philips has added new models to their LivingColors product line. The boxes and lamps are virtually the same, the remote is different. Both versions are labeled as “Generation 2”
The new buzzword is “smartlink“.
According to the manuals, both the old ( 69143 ) and the new version ( 69171 ) of the Gen 2 lamps use IEEE 802.15.4.
So now we have the “Generation 1” which does not work with the “Generation 2”, and there is the “Generation 2 smartlink“. Gen 1 and Gen 2 will not work with each other and i’m pretty confused about mixing “Gen 2” with and without “smartlink“.
The original LivingColors was pretty over engineered of what it did and it gave me the impression that Philips had bigger plans for these lamps. Apparently they do now with smartlink, but the original LivingColors was more of a prototype.
smartlink is interesting and promising. Philips was one of the founders of the Zigbee name and concept and they used some of the concepts and protocols of Zigbee for the smartlink enabled LivingAmbiance lamps.
For now, I’m stuck with two incompatible lamps.