Philips has created a system of internet-connected smart light bulbs that can transform the way you light your home. If you can afford the upfront costs, you won't find a better supported and easier to use smart lighting system on the market.
Hue, as you know, tries to transform your home by putting 16 million colors at your disposal and the ability to control, automate and expand your existing smarthome setup with some fancy LEDs and smartphone apps. This is how Hue can help you.
Philips Hue allows you to connect up to 50 bulbs at a time to a single system, which uses equipment called a bridge to control the lighting in your home. Connect the bridge to your existing wireless router, connect your light bulbs to the bridge, and you have a connected lighting system that you can control from anywhere in your home, even halfway around the world.
A starter pack will set you back around $200, though that price isn't relative globally (it's more like £180 in the UK and AU$250 in Australia). There are starter packs available in a variety of styles, including those that use smaller bulbs (chandelier) and others that feature larger (free-hanging) lamps, and you can always add a variety of hue lights to your setup. existing bridge. expandable.
If you are interested in alternative smart lighting solutions, James Bruce listed several options in his article Light Your Home With Smart Lights:Here Are Your Options Light Your Home With Smart Lights:Here Are Your Options Light Your Home With Smart Lights:Here Are Your Options options What exactly is a smart lamp and what is out there? Read more.
Recent additions to the Hue system include the Lightstrip, which is essentially controllable LED strips, and separate Bloom and Iris lamp systems that can be used as directional lights to show off the corners of your room or as smart bedside lamps. .
The Philips Hue system has a variety of benefits over standard lighting. Using geofencing, your lights can turn on and off when you're nearby. Set the alarm and you'll gently wake up to your choice of light. Use visual light-based timers to avoid burning your dinner or missing a TV show. These are the most basic functions, although their real-world uses may go beyond these limits.
Do you always fall asleep reading with the light on? Set a timer and the lights will go out before witching hour. On vacation and want to give the illusion that your house is occupied? Turn lights on and off freely from your smartphone or set alarms to have Hue do it for you. Have a party? There's even an app for that too.
Plus, the Hue lighting system contains a few presets designed to get the most out of you, whether it's soft and relaxing lighting, bright light to help you focus, energizing brightness to give you a boost, or the perfect reading light. Of course, you can go off the beaten track and set your own tone from 16 million colors, even using a photo as a starting point.
Your smartphone (or tablet) is key to controlling your Hue system, so it's reassuring that there are quite a few apps available overall. Fortunately, Philips has opened up the Hue API to developers, and developers have taken the opportunity to come up with some interesting creations.
The official Philips Hue apps for iOS and Android are absolutely necessary, and you'll use at least one of them when you initially set up your smart lighting. This is how you set alarms, create timers, set a geo-fence perimeter, create your own scenes, and choose from the built-in presets. It's the main access point for Philips Hue, and once you've connected it to the My hue portal, you can control your lighting from anywhere with an internet connection.
In addition to the official control app, Philips has an app called Ambilight + hue for iOS and Android. If you have a Philips TV that uses Ambilight, you can extend the range using its tonal lighting. Just plug in your TV, enter your room settings with the app, and sit back.
There are some great third-party iOS apps to control your Hue system. Goldee (Free) [No Longer Available] uses 12 “nature-inspired dynamic light scenes” to add a touch of humor to your setup. QuickHue ($0.99) lets you group your lights together and control them together, or individually, in record time. If that's not technical enough, Lightbow ($4.99) promises to be the "ultimate controller" for multi-brand connected lights.
MagicHue ($0.99) turns your home into a nightclub, using your iOS device's microphone as input so the lights react to sounds around you. HueDisco ($2.99) does a similar job, with plenty of customizable options. Philips Lightdance [no longer available] allows your lighting to respond to your device's camera, which sounds pretty cool, and there's also the Ambilight + hue app mentioned above.
There's actually a wide range of apps available to control Hue with iOS, like the (beautifully simplistic) Hue Remote ($2.99, above) or WAVES for Hue ($2.99) that lets you create dynamic control over your audio sequences. lights. These are just a few of the best, you'll find much more on the App Store under a search for “philips hue”.
While official app support is sparse, Android users still have an excellent range of apps to control their smart lighting. For more control, check out Hue Pro ($0.99) which allows fine control or Colorful (free) which supports animation. LampShade.io (free) is another handy app for grouping your light bulbs together and controlling them all at once.
If you're especially reliant on widgets, Hue Limited Edition lets you control Hue right from your home screen. Use Hue Disco ($2.99) to make your Hue lighting react to music, or if you rely on the power of Android automation Tasker Tasker for Android - a mobile app that suits your every whim When it comes to device automation, there's only one 900-pound gorilla in the Android space, and that's Tasker. It's true that Llama is an impressive free automation app, but it doesn't point to the full power of Tasker. Tasker... Read More
Just like in the iOS App Store, there are many apps available, not all of them good, mind, that you can find in a search for “philips hue“.
There isn't a huge amount of support for Windows Phone, in fact there aren't any official apps to speak of, but luckily the community has worked hard with the Hue API to create their own control solutions. Oni Light Control ($3.99) looks like the more advanced offering and supports preset scenes, custom color schemes, and voice control.
My Hue Light Switch ($0.99) is a much more basic app, but it gets the job done. Huetro (free) isn't an unattractive controller app either, and Hue Lumixury (free) even supports a scheduler. If you're looking for an app that can group your lights by room, LightUp ($0.99) should do the job just fine.
One last trick the Philips Hue system has up its sleeve is IFTTT integration. The service, which stands for If This Then That, is the simplest and most robust automation platform on the web. It uses a number of triggers and actions, although the tone can only be used as an action, that is, as a direct result of something else. Think of it as a light-based notification system.
Setting up the ringtone to react to your IFTTT account is easy, just go to IFTTT.com/hue, activate the channel, and then select a trigger.
Paired with a Nest Protect, Hue can be told to turn on all the lights if carbon monoxide levels get too high, or flicker all the lights if smoke is detected. Save money by automatically turning off all your lights at night, turn your lights blue so you know it's raining, or flash your lights when you get an email from that special someone.
IFTTT is massively powerful, limited only by the actions available (and there are eight, from turning on and off to dimming, flashing, and even starting a color loop) and your imagination or connected services. There are also a host of triggers, from being tagged in a Facebook post to keeping up with sports scores. You should check out our full guide on using IFTTT if you're not sure where to start.
The Philips Hue system is a very attractive element of smart home devices, but it comes at a price. For many, that price is still prohibitively expensive, but it has the saving grace of allowing you to build your lighting system piece by piece. Unfortunately, when you break a shade bulb (or it expires on time), you have to replace the entire bulb, which will set you back $60 for the basic offer.
If you can afford it and connected lighting is important to you, then you won't find an easier or more widely adopted system than Philips Hue. If connected lighting is what you're after, we recommend checking out our guide on how to use a Harmony remote to control cheap, standard RGB light strips. How to control your custom RGB lighting from a Harmony remote. If you own a Harmony remote, you probably know that they can now control Phillips Hue's "connected light bulb":a Wi-Fi enabled but exorbitantly priced, $200 set of LED bulbs. But did you know your... Read More place.
Let us know what you think of Philips Connected Lighting and Hue in the comments below.
