This has been driving me nuts for a while. I planned to put one of these flame bulbs into an outside socket, which is tied to a day/night sensor. The problem is that every bloody one of them on the market now is a "4 mode" light. This means that, presumably, every single time the sensor turns it off, then later back on, it will change modes. When you think about it, it is also not super convenient to have it doing this if the power goes out temporarily, or you have them in lights you bloody plan to turn on and off a lot. So... the question is, if I took one of these apart, which pin do I cut to stop the bloody thing from doing this?

BTW - there could have been a simple solution - an app controlled one, but I can only find two cases in which anyone made those and they have been "sold out" for at least 6 months.

 

This means that, presumably, every single time the sensor turns it off, then later back on, it will change modes.

The inclusion of the word 'presumably' seems to indicate that you have not actually verified this. Why not ask the seller if this is the case, or failing that buy one and try it out.

 

Yeah. Guess that is what I will have to eend up doing. Have to say though that this is yet one more example I have run across of, "How can we make this do stuff cheap, but not give a damn how the customer might use it?" Just having a version that doesn't include multiple modes would solve the whole issue.

Still, at least it's not one of those ubiquitous, "programmable light strings", where "program" means, "We just give you a link to the same app everyone else uses, you can't actually create your own light colors sequences, and we couldn't be bothered to even add any new ones that every other manufacturer has in the app by default." Gosh... it's almost like being back in the early 80s, having someone buy you a toy computer, which despite having a real 8080, or 6502 processor in it, can only be used to run the 4 crappy games pre-installed in onboard ROM.

Sorry for the rant, but this, "Heh, isn't this fun? Oh, you wanted real utility and function? Oops! We couldn't be bothered.", drives me nuts.

 

This has been driving me nuts for a while. I planned to put one of these flame bulbs into an outside socket, which is tied to a day/night sensor. The problem is that every bloody one of them on the market now is a "4 mode" light. This means that, presumably, every single time the sensor turns it off, then later back on, it will change modes. When you think about it, it is also not super convenient to have it doing this if the power goes out temporarily, or you have them in lights you bloody plan to turn on and off a lot. So... the question is, if I took one of these apart, which pin do I cut to stop the bloody thing from doing this?

BTW - there could have been a simple solution - an app controlled one, but I can only find two cases in which anyone made those and they have been "sold out" for at least 6 months.

Yeah. Guess that is what I will have to eend up doing. Have to say though that this is yet one more example I have run across of, "How can we make this do stuff cheap, but not give a damn how the customer might use it?" Just having a version that doesn't include multiple modes would solve the whole issue.

Still, at least it's not one of those ubiquitous, "programmable light strings", where "program" means, "We just give you a link to the same app everyone else uses, you can't actually create your own light colors sequences, and we couldn't be bothered to even add any new ones that every other manufacturer has in the app by default." Gosh... it's almost like being back in the early 80s, having someone buy you a toy computer, which despite having a real 8080, or 6502 processor in it, can only be used to run the 4 crappy games pre-installed in onboard ROM.

Sorry for the rant, but this, "Heh, isn't this fun? Oh, you wanted real utility and function? Oops! We couldn't be bothered.", drives me nuts.

It depends on which mode you want. I've tried 4 different "Effects LED" bulb models and they all default to the flickering flame effect. So every time you turn them on, this is the mode it powers up to.

If you're worried about this mode changing every time the lights are off (like during the day) and come back on again, don't. You have to power cycle them intentionally faster than normal off/on speed to change modes.

But (and this is the part that annoys me), if not changing modes and you want it to always come back to the mode you set it at, you're out of luck. The geniuses that designed them didn't add an IC to store your preference, so they always revert to default.

Sucks if you are wanting different effects, you have to on/off every night to set it. Even worse, if you are doing multiple effects for Halloween props (like flame and breathing effect) you have to dismantle your prop to access the bulb you want on breathe mode and unscrew/screw it back in the socket).

Either a design oversight, or corner cut to save 50¢.

At least on candelabra (C7 socket) bulbs.

 

Well, finally close enough to halloween that I decided to put one in. 1) this one does seem to remember, day to day, what mode it was in, which is good because 2) it defaulted to normal light mode for some bloody reason, but 3) I have no idea what a long enough power drop, such as enough to cause other devices to power off due to interruption, would do. I suspect, without a way to test it, that it would treat this as flipping a switch on and off.

I get the feeling that, unless you built your own... this is yet another product that suffers from enshitification - i.e. most people are happy with it just sort of working and wouldn't pay for a better one, so product makers rapidly reduced them to the bare minimum function they could, without rendering them completely useless, while not bothering to continue to make, or improve on, better models.