Everyone enjoys a little bit of Schadenfreude. And last week, both technology fans and people who still think computers will never catch on had a shared laugh at the Minnechaug Regional High School in Massachusetts. Apparently, their smart lights have broken in such a way that they’re stuck in the ‘on’ position and there’s no way of turning them off. Apparently not even flipping the circuit breakers can keep them from shining. Of course, the company that did the installation is now not even a name on its new parent company’s lineup, and nobody has any idea what to do?
So how about we all sit and pretend we actually know the details of the situation and come up with a solution. It’ll be easy, our hands aren’t tied by the hell of public education bureaucracy.
First thing to do is find a very large, blunt instrument. A hockey stick from their team will do (Go Falcons!), but a Baseball bat, croquet mallet, or the good-old-fashioned clue-by-four are also great options. Then you find the people responsible for designing the lights in such a way where they didn’t have mechanical fail-safes and the people who approved it and proceed to bludgeon them with said instrument repeatedly.
Don’t go against the grain on this, it’s really the keystone of the entire process.
The rest of it seems to be almost criminally simple, if prodigiously expensive. Get one of those freezer trailer rentals and place anything that’s at risk of spoiling there (you’ll probably want to do this outside of the school year) and get someone to rip every single smart light fixture on the entire building. Replacing them with similarly nice and Eco-friendly solutions, but ones that can be controlled by…a dumb light switch.
You’re off to the races from then on. If you pick the correct light switches and just wipe the server that controls the network and install something that can act as a Z-Wave hub, you’re off to the races. And the next time something breaks off compatibility, all you have to do is turn the light switch to off instead of having the clock or the motion sensor, or whomever has broken into the network controlling it.
The way I see it, there’s only one problem with this most brilliant of plans. At some point, there will be a failure. Someone from staff will switch the light off and that will be the end of that. That is, until next morning when they will be very befuddled at the fact that the light is not doing what it’s supposed to do, even though the computer should tell it to do that thing. There is no solution for this apart from having someone with the patience of an IT tech on staff. Being how it is a High School, the possibility of this is quite high.
You may think that they’d try the light switch, but you would be sorely mistaken. If the problem persists, consider using the first step mentioned on this article on them. If nothing else, it’ll be cathartic.
