Jan 01
Sure, light painting is awesome when you’re doing long exposure shots with a PixelStick or something
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Dec 23
Every year, my parents’ neighborhood in Dallas goes all-out for Christmas. We’re talking, trees wrapped in lights from trunk to top, teams of reindeer on display, and even a house with giant, moving jack-in-the-box effigies of every family member moving in sync with carols. Have you seen similar stuff? We want to see it.
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Dec 18
The AwoX StriimLight B-10 sounds crazier than it actually is. It’s a lightbulb, and it’s also a Bluetooth speaker. You screw it in, pair it to a device, and stream music to an 8W LED lightbulb.
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Dec 13
Hold a fluorescent light bulb near this table, and the filament will suddenly flicker on. It looks like magic, but it’s simple science: An embedded circuit produces an electromagnetic field that acts on the mercury gas inside the bulbs, making them glow as if they’re plugged in.
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Oct 25
There’s always something cool about any gadget that lights up like a Christmas tree. Whether you like it or not, they will grab your attention. This new JBL speaker is no exception. It looks like a great add-on for impromptu house parties.
The JBL Pulse LED Speaker is a small cylindrical speaker with a bunch of LEDs that will light up in sync with your music. Sound is produced by a pair of 40mm drivers and a 2x6W amp. Its rechargeable battery will last up to ten hours on one charge in audio mode, and up to five hours with the light show going.
Music is streamed via Bluetooth, and NFC enables quick pairing with compatible devices. There are five preset light configurations to choose from or you can customize the setup from an app.
The JBL Pulse speaker sells for $199.95(USD). It’s available for pre-order right now, and should start shipping in early November.
Oct 24
I really love having Philips Hue lights in my house. If I could, I’d do the whole house, but for now, I’ve only got my media room/arcade/mancave and my foyer done up with the colorful remote-controlled LED bulbs. However, one thing that has always been a bit lacking with Hue is the standard control app. It’s pretty limiting – it doesn’t do light animations or even acknowledge the concept of different rooms in your house. A little app has recently surfaced which adds both of these capabilities to Hue bulbs.
Goldee is a third-party app which has been made possible by Philips release of an SDK and API for Hue. The application’s primary purpose is to add dynamic looks to Hue which go beyond the static scenes enabled by other applications.
To use Goldee, simply add your bulbs and rooms to the app the first time you start up, then tap on the room and the scene you want to run. With the app’s built-in scenes, you can gradually watch the colors in your room shift to set one of ten moods. Each scene has been composed by a professional lighting designer and it shows.
My personal favorites are the pinky/orange hues of Night in Paris and the blue and green tones Aurora Glow. When you first fire up the app, you get the first eight scenes for free.
Sharing Goldee on social media opens up the ninth scene, while providing a review gets you the tenth. This is a clever take on downloadable content – instead of charging money for these unlockables.
As you can see from the video below, Goldee’s color sequences change very gradually – this isn’t a disco app. Goldee provides soothing and relaxing scenes which you can live with while you sit in a room and read a book, listen to music or throw a dinner party.
Goldee also offers a wake mode which can wake you up to its Sunrise scene, though without any Hue bulbs in my bedroom, I didn’t test this feature. You can apply scenes to multiple rooms simultaneously, a pretty slick trick that no other Hue control app does as far as I know. While the initial 10 scenes are all pretty good looking if you’ve got enough bulbs, Goldee promises a library of additional scenes you can run in the not-too-distant future.
A couple of quick notes about Goldee you should be aware of: 1) the app needs to be running – and in the foreground – to work; 2) there’s no way at this time to make your own custom scenes. I’m hoping that these are addressed in future releases – especially now that iOS7 allows true background applications.
You can download Goldee from the iTunes App Store for free.
Aug 17
A few months back, I outfitted my man-cave/media room with Philips Hue LED light bulbs in all of my recessed ceiling fixtures. This has given me the ability to set different moods in the room, and even automatically dim the lights to a warm, theater-like quality when I want to go watch a movie. However, up until now, the Hue ecosystem was pretty much limited to reflector bulbs. Recently, Philips released their first “Friends of Hue” products, which include the Hue Lightstrips and the now-Hue compatible Bloom lamp. Philips was kind enough to put both of these in my hands so I could see how well they worked alongside my other Hue lights.
I first cracked open the Hue Lightstrips, which allow you to add colorful accent lighting under furniture, on top of shelves or in other locations where you can conceal a strip of lights. Each Lightstrip is a 2-meter-long (~6.56 feet) bendy strip covered with LEDs about every 1-1/2 inches. The strip itself is covered with a flexible, optically transparent cover to protect the delicate LEDs and circuitry.
Each strip is connected to a cord which has a small wireless receiver pack and a small power adapter on the end. The strips can be cut at pre-marked locations about every 4 inches, but there’s no way to reconnect sections once cut, so you need to be careful to only trim off sections of LEDs you don’t ever plan to use again. Once you pick a location to install your Lightstrips, you can stick them in place using the sticky 3M adhesive on the back of the strip, or for less permanent installations, you can just lay the Lightstrip in place, and use cord clips to hold it in position.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Lightstrips are best used in straight lines or very large curves. It’s basically impossible to bend them into sharp angles, so if you want to achieve that sort of effect, you’ll need to buy multiple Lightstrips and cut them to length. I’m hoping that down the road Philips offers some sort of angle connectors so you can splice cut segments to each other.
The strip itself produces bright and saturated accent colors, though it can’t really achieve the pastels and whites of Hue light bulbs. That’s just fine by me, since these are really meant to be accent lights. Each LED can produce a range of 16 million colors and is quite bright.
Once plugged in, the Lightstrips work like any other Hue bulb. They can be easily paired with the base station using the Hue app, and also worked brilliantly with the LivingColors remote I have from an older Philips lamp I have in my room. Of course, it’s also compatible with the Hue API and 3rd party Hue apps too. Hue also works with IFTTT recipes, so you can do things like trigger your lights to change colors when you receive an email from a specific person, or based on the weather forecast.
In my case, I ended up installing the Lightstrips under the front lip of my custom arcade cabinet, adding bright and colorful illumination to the artwork on the base of the cabinet. I suppose if I had more strips, I would have put underside lighting on my couch, but a single Lightstrip wasn’t enough for my sectional.
Next up is the Bloom lamp. This lamp has actually been around for a little while as a LivingColors product, but is now being sold as a member of the Hue family, so it works out of the box with the Hue bridge and apps with no fiddling about. It’s also about $10 cheaper, since there’s no LivingColors remote included with the Hue version. The 120-lumen Hue Bloom is a 16 million color RGB accent light, delivering punchy colors, and is great as a wall wash lamp.
It was hard to tell, but the lamp appears to be made from metal, so it’s substantial for its size. This little 4-inch diameter lamp is bright enough to splash colors which can be seen clearly from the back of my 30-foot-long basement media room.
I placed the lamp behind one of my media towers, but it would also work great behind a television to increase perceived contrast, or just to make it look cool, like I’m doing with my older LivingColors Gen. 2 lamp.
Here are a few pics of my room, with all of my Hue lamps in action:
Overall, I’m impressed with everything about the Hue ecosystem, and am happy that Philips is starting to add new lamps to the series. Lightstrips can really add colorful accent lighting behind pictures, under sofas, and under cabinets – though their inability to be bent at sharp angles is a little limiting.
The complete Hue lineup is available from Apple Store locations. Lightstrips sell for $89.95(USD), and the Bloom lamp sells for $79.95. Keep in mind that all Hue products require the Hue bridge, which is only available in the $199.95 Hue starter kit, which also include three Hue bulbs.
Disclosure: Philips provided the products for review in this article. However, all reviews are the unbiased views of our editorial staff, and we will only recommend products or services we have used personally, and believe will be good for our readers.
Aug 07
The Philips Hue lighting system is a great way to spice up the ambient color of your home by just swapping out a few lightbulbs. Now the smartphone-controlled illumination system is getting its own TRON-like hardware meant for accent lighting.
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Jul 19
Lumenplay Smart String Lighting: 16 Million Reasons to Leave the Christmas Lights Hanging
Posted in: Today's ChiliRigado LLC multiplies the appeal of smart LED bulbs with Lumenplay, a modular LED Christmas light set. Like LIFX and Philips HUE, you control Lumenplay using your smartphone – in this case, via a Bluetooth connection. Pick from 16 million lighting colors and a variety of effects and even synchronize the bulbs to music.
The basic Lumenplay kit comes in two variants: a 10′ strand with 15 bulbs or a 20′ strand that has 30 bulbs. You can then purchase more as needed and connect the strands up to 340′. The bulbs have a lifespan of about 20,000 hours – that’s about 2 years and 3 months – and you can replace their bulb covers.
The downside? Unlike other smart LED bulbs, its mobile app doesn’t seem to have a timer feature. Lumenplay is also quite expensive, but at this point all LED bulbs are pricey. Pledge at least $54 (USD) on Crowd Supply to get a Lumenplay set as a reward.
[Thanks Alan!]
Jun 23
Some spaces are awkward. Dark corners or cavernous closets that could really use some light. And tap lights don’t always cut it in terms of brightness or aesthetic quality. But Australian designer Flynn Talbot is working on the situation. His aluminum and steel lights, called Latitude, can go anywhere and point in any direction.
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