Nov 05
The first bulbs in Philips’ color-changing, app-controlled Hue
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Nov 05
Philips Hue Continues To Dominate Smart Lighting With New BR30, GU10 And Disney Lights
Posted in: Today's Chili
Philips announced an expansion to its Hue line of connected light bulbs today, with new BR30, GU10 and Disney StoryLight products. The new lights and accessories add to the growing family of Philips products, which currently included the Philips 3-bulb Starter Kit, single bulbs and its LightStrips and LivingColors Bloom “Friends of Hue” lamps.
The new BR30 kit launches today for $199, and includes three LED downlights, generally for use in in-ceiling light fixtures in North America, as well as a Hue bridge (ZigBee-based), power supply and Ethernet cable. Individual additional BR30 lightbulbs are also available for $59 each, but you’d need the bridge for them to work. Up to 50 Hue lights can be connected to a single Hue bridge. Each bulb offers approximately 80 percent power savings over their incandescent equivalent, and should offer a total lifetime of 15,000 hours.
I tested the BR30s from Philips, and they work just as well as the original Hue lights released by Philips, and can be combined with those on the same Bridge as well. I didn’t have any flush-mount ceiling light fixtures to try the Hue BR30s in at home, but in the lamps that I did test them with, I found them to cast a more full (it’s the brightest Hue yet at 630 lumens), even light versus their standard bulb Hue equivalents.
If you’re new to Hue, the BR30s are as good a jumping on point as any, since they also come with a bridge in the $199 starter pack, available at Apple and Amazon.com. Hue bulbs are easy to setup, via process that involves plugging the bridge into power and then plugging that into your Internet router. Then, you simply download the Hue app for iOS on your iPhone, search for the bridge and tap the physical button on the bridge itself to pair them.
Hue now has a lot of third-party apps that it works with, too, including some for Mac, and apps that offer shifting patterns based on music, photographs and other input. To set up any of those, it’s a simple matter of tapping the pair button on the bridge to authorize each. BR30 setup is just the same as it has been for other Hue products, which is to say dead simple.
Hue’s G10 kits are available to European customers now, at £179 per kit, and £49 each, and will launch in the U.S. in December. These are often used in track lighting, and feature two peg-like prongs – you’ll probably be familiar with them if you have Ikea bedroom or kitchen ceiling-mounted fixtures. With the introduction of the BR30 and the GU10, Philips is really expanding its appeal into a broader range of consumer bulbs. The Disney StoryLight provides an interesting use case, since it combines an app with Hue lighting to add to children’s content, and the initial Mickey Mouse bulb accessory is essentially a Living Color Bloom with Mickey ears.
Philips is doing a great job of owning this market before anyone else really even realizes it exists. Others including startups like LIFX and Spark have attempted to make their way into the same space, but seem to be stalled at the starting gate, or at least well behind Philips is progressing steadily with its own new products, signing on partners and building a strong developer ecosystem, which means it should own the smart lighting segment now and for a long time to come.
Nov 05
Philips promised more focused lighting options for the holidays as part of its hue wireless bulb range, and the company has delivered, revealing not only two new bulb types, but a tie-in with Disney that integrates special Mickey-themed lamps with interactive story books. The hue BR30 is headed to the US first, targeting the popular […]
Nov 05
Philips hue BR30 Review
Posted in: Today's ChiliPhilips’ hue range of wireless lights has come a long way from its ZigBee beginnings, but it’s the new BR30 downlight bulbs that the Dutch company expects to really crack the US market. Still packing the same multi-colored, Android and iOS controlled convenience for the DIY smart home, these latest hue bulbs now fit into […]
Oct 24
If you’ve ever stepped foot in an intensive care unit, you’ll know that they can be pretty grim environments. That’s all changing, though, thanks to LED lighting systems that can actually be used to improve patient care.
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Oct 17
Philips’ next expansion for the hue remote-controlled LED lightbulbs will be out before the end of the year, the company’s head of technology has confirmed. “We’re busy bringing out new ways of interacting but also new ways of bringing lighting into your home” George Yianni said at Mobilize today, before revealing that hue will add […]
Oct 11
During Wisconsin’s long, bitterly cold winters, the only things that grow are snow banks. So to keep Lambeau Field’s turf in game shape for Sunday, the Packers roll out these massive Friday night lights.
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Oct 04
This giant colorful honeycomb is called the SOL Dome. Made from thousands of interconnected fiber optics, the structure responds to its environment as if it were a living, breathing plant.
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Oct 03
Goldee Does Dynamic Lighting For Philips Hue, Banks On A Future Where Light Isn’t Static
Posted in: Today's Chili
A brand new app called Goldee launches today, offering Phlips Hue users a new way to use their connected lighting system. The app provides dynamic “light scenes” which use artist-sourced photos as their palette, changing tones gradually to provide dynamic shifts in color, including gradual on/off sequences for waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night.
There are 10 different scenes included in the app at launch, each which a brief description and credits (citing the scene’s creator, the photographer of the source image and the location where it was taken). Tapping on any starts the dynamic lighting, with each bulb attached to your Philips Hue system taking part. You can specific if you have multiple rooms in a single home with Hue bulbs, too, and run a different scene for each. The first light scene also has an alarm feature, and the last one has a sleep timer for going to bed.
The app works well, but there are some caveats – you have to have the app running in the foreground to get the dynamic effect to work, and the screensaver built-in to keep your display from using too much juice is a little finicky when it comes to returning your display to full brightness once you activate the screen again. But on the whole, it’s a unique experience, and one that Hue owners are likely to appreciate.
“The Goldee team started innovating home lighting even before Philips hue was introduced,” Goldee CEO Tomas Baran explained in an interview. “We figured out right away that Philips hue is a very good tool to build upon [with lighting]. However, the Goldee App is only our first step towards changing how we perceive and interact with light.”
Baran says that there are plans in place to do “something much bigger,” which he expects to reveal more about later this year. He calls light “a new form of art,” hence sourcing its scenes from people with experience in that field, and notes that light is never static in nature. I asked whether this might be a bit narrow in terms of focus for a whole company, but Baran says Goldee is betting we’re just seeing the beginning of change in this space.
“Every new thing is risky in the beginning, but if we wait until it becomes popular it will already be too late,” he said. “We believe a revolution has started in the lighting sector with smart LEDs. We have no doubt this will be the future. We used to watch black-and-white TVs, nowadays we cannot imagine a display without colors. Obviously, it will take time, but we see the same thing happening with light. “
The app is free, and so far the only content that’s locked within the app can be made available via either rating the app or sharing via Twitter and Facebook. There is a “library” section that promises to add additional light scenes in future, and some of those may arrive as paid upgrades. For now, Goldee is a well-executed curiosity, but it’ll be interesting to see if smart lights really do herald the kinds of changes Baran envisions.
Sep 25
Finding the right lighting for your home can be a tough challenge these days. You can get ceiling-mounted lights, recessed lights, track lights, wall lights—you can even get fancy with a chandelier or a floor lamp! But what about something fun? Look no further than these "Memory lights".
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