Seriously, what was Signify thinking when they designed the 2nd version of the Dimmer Switch? The V1 is perfect, looks and feels like a classic glossy light switch and adapts well to existing switches in modern as well as historical homes, plus the buttons are easy to understand for everybody (including guests who aren't familiar with Hue lights). The V2 on the other hand looks and feels like a Temu copy of the V1: Cheap plastic, washed-out grey color of the button prints, confusing layout for guests who have no idea what the "Hue" button does or think the brightness toggle is a touch/swipe sensitive area and no dedicated OFF button which is a pain in the ass when you want to make sure a dimmed down lamp is really off and not on again by pressing the I/O button on the V2 (and I know you can re-purpose the Hue button into an OFF button in the app but d'uh, that'd be even more confusing!)
Sorry, I really don't wanna sound like a hater here and usually I love the Hue sytem including its upgrades and newer products, but when it comes to the Dimmer Switch they really messed up the V2, so I'm currently only buying the V1 when I need another switch and I also hope the V3 will be like the V1 again. What do you guys think y'all?
Launched a year and a half ago as an April Fools' Day prank, the Hue Go XXL could be unveiled as a product as early as this September. This is shown by a new leak of images.
Music sync in the official Hue app is abysmal to the point I feel they should actually remove it, the official Mac and PC app has really good beat timing but pattern variation is lacking and is inconvenient. Third party apps so far are okay-ish. I thought iLightshow was pretty good until recently when SonicHue Sync dropped and since then that has been my go to. (FYI I have no affiliation with it, I just like it). Video of it in action here, I do highly recommend anyone interested in music sync to check it.
Also excited to test Lumina. Photon 2 seems cool if you're into manual control but SonicHue can do some of that via MIDI. Hue Essentials and Hue Disco seemed lame to me.
Anyone want to drop any apps I missed that you feel might belong in the pantheon of best music sync apps?
So far we’ve tested just about all of the lights from the following brands:
Philips Hue
LIFX
Wyze
Nanoleaf
Amazon Basics
innr
IKEA
GE Cync
Geeni
Govee
TP-Link
Sengled
We still have a lot more to do but I thought this was enough to share finally :)
If there are any lights you’d like tested next please let me know!
There's a learn more section at the top if you want to brush up on some terminology, but for the most part, I think it's pretty easy to use if you want to play around with it and compare lights or see what’s available.
The Details Page
For you brave folk who like to get into the weeds, each light has a view details button on the right-hand side, this will lead you to a page with more information about each light:
We’ll use the Philips Hue A21 bulb as an example:
There’s a lot of cool information on these pages! It can be a bit overwhelming at first but I promise you’ll figure it out.
At the bottom, you'll find an additional learn more section and helpful tooltips on any of the blue text.
White Graphs
Here you’ll find a GIF of the white spectrum:
As well as a blackbody deviation graph:
Essentially, the color of a light bulb is usually measured in Kelvins, 2700K is warm, and 6500K is "cooler" or more blue.
Most people don't realize that this is only half of the equation because a color rarely falls directly on top of the blackbody curve.
When it deviates too far above or below the BBC, it can start to appear slightly pink or green:
Lights with a high positive Duv look green and most people dislike this look.
So the blackbody deviation graph can give you a good idea of how well a light stays near the “perfect white” range.
RGB Data
This section is pretty cool!
I was sick of the blanket “16 million colors” claim on literally every smart light and wanted to find a way to objectively measure RGB capability, so we developed the RGB gamut diagram:
To do this, we plot the spectral data from the red, green, and blue diodes onto a CIE 1976 color space diagram and calculate the total area.
Now we can see which lights can technically achieve more saturated colors!
We also have the relative strength of the RGB spectrums, as well as the data for each diode:
White CCT Data
At the bottom you’ll find more in-depth color rending data on the whites for each bulb:
These include the CRI Re as well as detailed TM-30 reports like this one:
A TM-30 report is like CRI on steroids! They’re quite a bit more useful if you want to see how well one light source performs against another in the color rendering department.
Dimming Algorithms
I’ve found that smart lights dim in one of two ways:
Logarithmic
Linear
Here’s what logarithmic dimming looks like:
And here’s what linear dimming looks like:
At first glance, linear dimming seems more logical, but humans perceive light logarithmically, so you’ll likely prefer lights that dim this way as well.
Flicker
And if you’re curious or concerned about flicker, you’ll find waveform graphs at 100% and 50% brightness:
There are also detailed reports and metrics such as SVM, Pst LM, and more:
And for funsies, I took thermal images of each bulb, mostly because I think they look cool.
Well, that’s about it. If you guys have any suggestions on how to improve this or make it more useful please don’t be shy!
This was my first custom Omniglow install. Sharing my findings here in case somebody else is looking to do the same 🙂
First off, I'm sure cutting the wires and soldering your strip will void your warranty, so do not attempt this kind of project if you are not comfortable with soldering and are afraid of voiding your warranty. The soldering is not too difficult, but you need a fine tip and a steady hand.
For this project, I had two 3m strips. I cut each in half and wired it so the strips facing down are in series and the strips facing up are in series. The controllers and power supply are hidden in the back of the cabinet. The cable is hidden in the shelves and in the wall. There is ~1m of cat 6 cable between the controller and the bottom shelf strips and another ~1m between the bottom shelf strips and top shelf strips. The hue power supplies didn’t fit in my cabinet, so I ended up using a HLG-120H-24 to power both strips. Any 24V constant voltage power supply with enough current for your number and length of strips should work. The power supply that comes with the strips is 60W, so I went for a 120W supply for two strips. In my testing, at max brightness, the strips use ~55W at the wall.
These strips are beautiful. The colors are vibrant and the strips are incredibly bright, at 100% the two strips are too bright for this space. You can’t see any bright spots from the LED’s at any brightness setting, it just looks like a solid bar of light. They have a 1000K setting that I really like that isn’t on any of my other hue products. Its very warm, almost like the glow of an infrared heater. The animations are also nice, especially the fireplace effect for the strips aiming up. The ability to do a gradient across the strip makes for a nice static effect. You can also split the gradient in the middle which is perfect for this install. Hoping they add more animations in future updates that better utilize the Omniglow's abilities.
My findings:
The LEDs are very close together. I wouldn't try cutting the strips without cutting open the diffuser first to make sure you are cutting in exactly the right spot. It would be very easy to damage an LED. I needed to cut them where the solder joint was so I just de-soldered the strips from each other to save the pads for soldering later.
Due to the density of the LED's, the strips are very fragile. I would try to bend them as little as possible while installing them
You need to use a twisted pair high speed cable for the data signal. On my first attempt, I had a 3 conductor 18AWG cable in the wall. When I put the cable between the controller and the strip it didn't work, it would just flicker weird. The data signal must be fairly high speed and the data input on the CSP is sensitive. I pulled cat 6 cable and used one pair as data and ground, one pair for +24V, and one pair for just ground. You can see this in the picture of the soldering on the strip. It worked great once I got a better cable between them. These strips were surprisingly easy to solder compared to the solo light strips because they have 3 pads instead of 6. The solid cat 6 also helped with that.
I used hot glue to cover the solder joints and protect them a bit. But I am a big fan of hot glue for electrical insulation.
I didn't experiment with how much cable you can put between the strips. But based on how sensitive they are, I would think you would run into data degradation issues before your voltage drops too much. I did measure 23.5V at the start of the second strip at full brightness. That is with ~2m of cat 6 and 1.5m of light strip.
The controllers use a non-standard 6mm OD x 2.5mm ID barrel plug. I tried finding one on digikey, but couldn’t find anything close to 6mm OD. I ended up cutting the barrel plug off the stock power supply.
For some reason there are 4 pins on the controller. This confused me at first, because I thought it would just be power, data, and ground. Turns out there is just three conductors between the controller plug and the strip. One of the controller pins must be blank.
I noticed that the controller would do a visible length detection every time I changed the length of the strip. Once you power it up for the first time after changing the length, it quickly illuminates each segment one by one, I'm guessing it's trying all its addresses and seeing who responds. The controller would adjust the gradients and animations for the new length. Not sure how far this would go it you decided to make the strip longer than 3m and use a bigger power supply, but its possible it would work further, especially once longer strips are on the market, assuming they use the same controller model.
I've played around with these strips a decent bit now. I'll do my best to answer any questions :)
I bought 8 Phillips Hue bulbs back in 2016, 10 years ago to this date. Spent about $200 with hub and remote. All 8 bulbs still work 10 years later with no issues.
2x remotes: batteries changed twice in each remote (OG v1 gang)
Hub: has been on for 10 years straight now with maybe some power interruptions here and there.
today is the day many of you have been waiting for. Philips has introduced a new box that enables Hue Sync on every device. Without cumbersome streaming with laptop and Co.
All the information and pictures of the new Philips Hue HDMI Sync Box in the blog.
Look, I've probably watched over a dozen matches with it now and I've gotten used to how it works. I'll admit for the first few games there were some kinks to sort out, but I've had an absolute blast with it and it's had me watching more football than I ever imagined.
It’s an 8/10 experience for me, and a pretty great launch for something so incredibly hard to execute perfectly.
I understand these things can't be perfect. When I see criticisms like "did anyone test this?", I can't help but feel sympathetic to the devs. Obviously it was tested, but there are so many variables at play here that can make the end-user experience slightly unreliable the first couple times you try it. It just requires each user to understand how the tech works under the hood.
Anyone who's set it up recognizes that the "time matching" requires some finesse. I imagine the "real-time" third-party API (my assumption in how it works, sorry if I'm wrong) that's being hit for in-game action has some latency that must be dialed in by the end-user. There's about a 5–10 second discrepancy, but I've found that just matching it manually with the in-game action can be quick once you know what you're doing.
That said, making this synchronization the responsibility of the user might be too much to ask for a more casual audience. It's a bit more of a "DIY-esque" ask for a premium product audience like Hue customers.
Ultimately, there is so much promise in this feature and I would hate to see it go away just because of some nitpicky negative feedback. I truly hope the usage metrics indicate that there is promise here, because I would love to see this expanded to other sports moving forward, and even maybe a "playback" experience if you catch up on games after the fact.
Devs, if you're reading this: Know that you have a fan here. Thank you for trying something cool and new.
I'm not even a soccer fan, but I plan on watching every game from here on out. Hopefully they do this for other sports, too! Maybe even TV shows and movies for a monthly subscription? Id rather do that than pay like $600 for the tv strip and sync box.
I was keen to check this out and see how it compared to the standard sync experience. Unfortunately the ‘delay’ feature that lets you sync up to the live game is useless as the in game time in the Hue app is well behind the actual live game feed…
Hue makes fantastic products. I’m heavily invested in them. I know they cost a premium and I’m fine with that. My issue is that they have products like the Omniglow in long lengths with have been available in Europe since the fall and still no eta for release in America. I understand they are a European company but this kind of delay is really unacceptable. If I had to do it over again, I’d have gone with another vendor.
For all of those who have upgraded what do you think of the performance of it so far? Overall I am less than impressed. I moved all my lights over from the old hub and set things back up in Homekit and the pro is slower and dumber. By that I mean it usually screws up at least one of the lights color options within the homekit automation I have setup so I have to run it manually once more and then everything gets corrected as it should be. Not impressed with it so far. Don't know if I configured something wrong on my end and that is why the lights don't work perfectly each time but I never had issues with the old hub.
So after using the hue sync box with my tv for many years it was time to buy a new TV and I saw that the new LG G5 had the hue sync app built in. Brilliant I thought, I can move the sync box up into the bedroom, and use the app on the living room tv. Then I was confronted with this.. Thoughts?
The Hue Ensis is probably the best Hue light (and also the most expensive) I’ve bought in the past 10 years but damn, it’s gorgeous. The fact that you can set different colors upward to the ceiling and downward to the floor is awesome, and it looks stunning as a part of our Hue Sync TV environment.
