Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Review - The Phillips Hue Lights and the Syfy Synch App



I made a video so you can see the colors shifting! This is basically my favorite of the many options, though I'm also fond of the Passing Clouds option, which has natural light and periodic dims, and Candlelight, which is warm and flickery.

I won this starter set of the Phillips Hue Lights from a sweepstakes run by the 12 Monkeys twitter account, and lemme tell you, it's super-neat. No really necessary at all, but definitely neat.

Pros:
  • Lots of options
  • Voting and suggestions on new lighting options being added to the store
  • Nifty
  • Rainbows!
  • Pretty easy to set up
Cons:
  • The app doesn't make it super-intuitive to know which lightbulb you're talking to--it just numbers them, but there's not really numbers on the bulbs so you have to figure out which is 1, 2 or 3
  • Sometimes it gets stuck on one light color or pattern
  • A little laggy if there's any interference
With the Syfy Synch app, you can connect your lights to various Syfy Channel shows and then as the colors of the light change on the TV, your lights change to match. It's a cool idea, and very atomospheric, but a little buggy. Maybe it's just that the tech is new, or maybe our internet is that unreliable, but it couldn't seem to keep synched, and I kept having to restart the app because it kept crashing.

But when it worked? It was awesome.

I know that there's all these recipes on IFTTT.com for Hue lights, so I'm going to look into those for making them more useful and less of a novelty, and in the meantime, I'm going to keep my bedroom in a rainbow-progressing loop.

Because why not?

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