I want a smart bulb for the lamp in my toddler's room. Sometimes he gets scared in the middle of the night and I want something that he can turn on at a low brightness and maybe even non-white color that can help him see a little bit but without being so bright to wake up his little sister. I've already got a Zen34 that I plan on putting where he can reach it in his bed (top of a bunk bed).
I do not want a Zigbee bulb. I literally have 0 Zigbee devices in my house and it would probably not connect well to the hub. If there are no good zwave bulbs, I'll explore other options.
The best I have seen is Inovelli.. But Z-Wave color commands are very chatty and require a lot of bandwidth so bulbs on Z-Wave is very problematic.. I recently switched all my bulbs to LIFX and could not be happier..
The LIFX bulbs look like they're wifi. Honestly would be fine with wi-fi as well as long as they can be remotely controlled and not rely on some cloud connection. Do you have to use their app or a cloud api to control the bulbs?
You start with an App to get the bulb on your wifi. I used HomeKit for the two Lifx bulbs I own. So... not a new app on my phone. YMMV. Once the IP address has been assigned, you'll never go into that app again for that bulb. Add the Hubitat Lifx app and discover devices. No Internet required, it's all local to your network.
That sounds perfect. It won't even be a net new device on my home network either because the lamp is currently on a kasa plug. That only gives on or off though and is to bright, which is why I started looking into a bulb.
Does anyone know the differences between the more normal looking dome shaped bulb and the weird flat bulb? I'm guessing the flat bulb is more for a housing that directs the light out of the housing into a particular direction and the dome one would be for a lamp that emits light all around in every direction.
Another question... mainly because I don't know anything about light bulbs. The flat one says it's A19 and the dome shaped one doesn't. From what I can tell, this has to do with the size/shape of the bulb. Both bulbs use an E26 base. So I'm guessing the dome shaped one is "mini".
Regarding lumens... If a bulb has higher lumens does that mean it won't dim as low? I'm not sure if both bulbs have the same minimum brightness and one just has a higher peak brightness, or if the lowest brightness is a certain percentage of the peak brightness.
If you have echo devices nearby, consider Bluetooth bulbs like Sengled. I got a few "free*during black Friday sales, didn't think I'd like them at all. They work great for bedside table lamps.
Probably true.. But 1% of both is very dim.. With a custom driver you could go even lower than 1% as these bulbs take brightness from 0-65535 instead of 0-100%
With with HE why would you rely on cloud based device to control bulbs while you could either get Lifx (100% local) or Something like Sengled zigbee bulbs (also 100% local)?
I just added 5 Senglee Zigbee bulbs to my system. Already had a couple of Zigbee repeaters to control a hose timer valve for pool filling, on the other side of the house. These bulbs work great and actually respond faster than many of my ZWave devices.
