so the holidays are here and that means it's time for the usual trappings of the
christmas season excess spending excess
amount of eggnog and excess decorative lighting now for many
people this might just mean grabbing some lights from that box in the attic
throwing them into an outlet and draping them over something but that isn't
exactly very fun or interesting and maybe that's why we've seen so many
smart christmas lights hit the market in the last couple of years
but are the options out there good enough to turn your average tech heads
house into a veritable santa's workshop that you can control in the palm of your
hand well it's time to find out
after we thank rosewill for sponsoring this video check out their neon k85
gaming keyboard with mechanical switches and m53 gaming mouse with up to 4000 dpi
at the links below
so we're going to be looking at a few different options for your high tech
holiday setup with varying feature sets but all four of them seem to have one
simple idea as an integral part of their
design philosophies having to continually unplug and re-plug
your lights every night is a massive pain
especially after going to all the trouble of setting them up in the first
place especially if your decorating style reminds the neighbors of clark
griswold so just how convenient then did our
contenders make our experience first up let's have a look at the
twinkly system from italian concern led
works and even though the sales rep might give you a confused look if you
walk into the store and ask for twinkly lights it did actually come to us on a
very handsome looking not to mention well labeled box
twinkly more than any of the other products in this video seems designed
specifically with christmas trees in mind which is cool because the app will
connect to your phone's camera and will actually map where each individual led
bulb is on the tree after you set them up you'll be able to
see this map on your screen so that you can address each light individually for
granular control allowing you to draw
custom effects onto the tree unfortunately the app's a little finicky
it couldn't find the light set way too often and the system was a bit slow to
respond at times so the ability to create these custom effects is cool but
it's not very intuitive and the setup was kind of a pain as it didn't specify
that you need to be on the 2.4 gigahertz band when connecting it to your home
network you could use it on the five gigahertz band but only after it was up and
running with all that said the lights themselves look great they're plenty
bright and the effects really helped bring john's we're actually at john's
house right now john's tree to life they are a bit pricey at 110 dollars for a
105 light starter set and that gets even
worse because i would definitely consider getting an extension if you
really want full coverage of your tree this one actually needed a second set of
plain old regular lights to complete the look and at that price point i would
expect better app implementation but overall this one's not a bad buy at all
on the subject of underwhelming app support let's take a look at the lumen
play from s4 lights next unlike twinkly
this one connects via bluetooth 4.0 so
you'll need to make sure your phone is compatible and even then the app might
still cause problems so it was totally non-responsive on a nexus 6p running
Android 8.0 oreo although we did get it working on devices using Android 7 or
iOS 11. with all that said any app that
hasn't been updated in a while isn't a good sign
physically though the lights themselves felt heavy duty and well made and i
wouldn't worry about putting them outside in the elements but the flip
side is this did make them a little bit unwieldy and cumbersome for indoor use
especially with the three bulky modules that we needed for just
the 36 lights that you see in the kitchen here which i imagine would make
them pretty annoying to try to put on a tree
the effects that you can select look all right though you can create your own
maybe because when we tried certain patterns
of animations ended up throwing random colors into our setup
so while the lights themselves aren't bad the very buggy app experience earns the
lumen play a pass from us at 160 dollars
for 36 lights though the set your lights
to music feature actually did work nearly flawlessly as long as you're
playing something from your phone's local storage that isn't drm protected
so that's good if you want to stare at something other than a yule log while
you listen to christmas carols speaking of yule logs there's one
product family with so many lighting options i'm surprised they haven't
released a smart yule log philips hue which you've probably seen
on display at your local big box store the cool thing about this is that they
can all be controlled by this little wi-fi puck thing called the bridge which
can connect to up to 50 different lights
so you'll probably only need one we have a
pair of hue light strips which we tried running behind some pcs and behind this
couch for a bit of christmas themed bias lighting as well as two of the area
effect hue goes no relation to the french novelist philips hue was easily
the most polished experience with a slick intuitive app interface with very
low latency and that responsiveness is exactly what you want when you're
dealing with an elaborate lighting setup also remote access over the internet was
easy to set up and worked like a charm the go lights aren't super bright but
they're powerful enough to light up a corner and they have cool features like
three hours of battery life if you want to move them around or position them
somewhere temporarily during a christmas party and the ability to tilt them up on
this little integrated stand to aim them at your wall phillips does offer another
area effect light called the bloom which is slightly more powerful but we
couldn't get our hands on that one for this video the light strips on the other
hand get extremely bright if you just
set them to emit white light and are actually like i'd say they're bright
enough to really change how your workspace feels unfortunately you can
only set them to one color through the native app even if you have two strips
joined together like we did like the other options hue is extremely
customizable within the app but this is cool it also features a large
number of third-party apps with pre-loaded color profiles including
christmas themed one this setup is a bit pricey including 60 bucks
just for the control bridge but having a very pro feeling experience that works
almost without a hitch makes it at least
somewhat easier to justify but maybe even if you could afford it it's
possible that you already have like 10 000 bulbs worth of existing dumb
christmas lights and just don't see the point of tossing them all in the garbage
well if that sounds like you you might be interested in something like the wemo
from belkin which isn't really a lighting product at all instead wemo
makes smart outlets that plug into your existing ones
now although they won't suddenly make the el cheapo lights that you got at the
dollar store customizable and super fancy they will at least enable control
from your phone and a light schedule randomizer in case you're leaving for
the holidays and you want to deter any grinches that are roaming around we
weren't huge fans of how bulky the plugs
are but that was really the only complaint setup
wasn't hard although again you'll need to use the 2.4 gigahertz band initially
and then you can control it over 5 gigahertz later and remote access over
the internet is enabled by default and worked just fine the app interface is no
nonsense and the plug itself actually gives off an extremely satisfying
audible click when you turn your lights on and
well that's on but not off off so you don't have to wonder whether it worked
the fancier insight switch will also give you a one touch report on power
consumption and if you enter how much your power company charges you it'll even tell you
exactly how much you're spending on keeping your house looking like one of
those shopping mall santa displays the good news is that while you don't
get any actual lights they are a cheaper
option compared to the other ones we've looked at at 80 bucks for two switches
if you already own lights now to be clear none of the products
we've looked at here are really geared towards those folks who want to do like
crazy custom lighting setups that require a pc or a raspberry pi to drive
them not to mention more extensive programming
but with that said hue does have a public API if you are into that sort of
thing however from what we've seen for the main streamers out there there
are plenty of options that while not perfect could add a little bit of
fun techy christmas joy to your holiday setup if
you choose the right one especially if your aunt's dancing santa
claus just isn't cutting it this year
speaking of not cutting it is your computer case not cutting it be quiet!
just release their versatile dark base 700 midi tower and to celebrate they're
having a contest it's called the dark bay 700 character builder you have to
build and configure a pc through their site we'll have that linked below for a
chance to win that system or one of eight dark base 700 cases the contest
runs from now until november 29th and the winners will be announced by be
quiet on december 1st so check it out at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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stuff that we featured in the video description also link down there we've
got our merch store which oh i don't think we carry this horrible sweater anymore but the t-shirt i'm wearing
under it we've got that in our merch store and we've also got a link to our community forum