iLuv Launches 'Rainbow8' Smart Bulb With HomeKit Support and Hub-Less Design

[Laird Knox]

If you don't mind, can you tell me which brand/lights are doing your 'green'? I steered away from Hue because I read many a complaint about its green color which is the most important color to me. The green lights in your pics look great and I was curious who made them.

The exterior lights are Sylvania Lightify retrofit kits. Amazon had two packs for about $70 a while back.

The interior track lights are Mi-Light GU-10 4 watt LEDs. I went with the 4 watt bulbs because the 5 watt ones didn't fit in my track lights. The cool thing is that they have six chips - two RGB, two warm white, and two cool white. You don't have to pick warm or cool and I set them in between for better color rendering on my photos. I purchased them directly from the manufacturer and they ended up being $10 each, shipped.

The bad thing about the Mi-Lights is that they don't work with any other systems. Thankfully ha-bridge can address that but you have a bit of leg work to get it working. It also means that you have to have an always on computer to run the bridge (it can be something as small as a Raspberry Pi).

I first played with the Mi-Lights with their four lamp kit from Thorfire which I see is down to $30 now. Not bad for four lights and a remote to play with. The remote is a bit touchy because it has capacitance controls. Just picking it up you typically turn things on and off by accident. Still, not bad for 30 bucks.

Here's the GU-10 lamps from Christmas to see a bit more of the green...

That was right after I hung the photos and before I setup the lighting for them. And another shot of the Lightify lamps from Christmas:

Yes, I can change my exterior lights based on the holiday.

I'm happy with the color saturation on both systems.

 

[JustSomeInfo]

Looks great! Thank you so much for the detailed response. That was very kind of you.

 

[PaulSpr]

Not having a hub is not an advantage. I've got a bunch of Elgato Eve stuff (which is hub-less) and they don't work as reliably as my Hue kit that does have a hub.

For example: My Eve Room is as good as useless. We've put it in the kids room, but it never relays any data because it's to far away from an iPhone or AppleTV to get a decent bluetooth connection. So anytime I open the Eve or Home app I need to physically walk to the Eve Home and wait for it send all the data.

With a hub, all that data could have been send to the hub over a connection that can have a lot more range than bluetooth. The hub can make a connection to your phone over the network since it presumably has wifi. Also, the hub could hold automation data and schedules.

Let me put this another way: If there was a Homekit alternative to Elgato Eve in Europe that used a hub, I would switch instantly.

 

[imola.zhp]

Siri does have her problems, but pushing the Siri button on my AppleTV remote and saying "turn off my hallway light" works both immediately and with very high reliability.

And there shouldn't be any router slowdown in the way you're thinking - merely having something on the network imposes almost zero burden, a router can track thousands of devices with no problem (the device is just one row in an array to the router), it's all a question of how much network traffic is going to and from each device. A HomeKit device will spend a fraction of a second every 4 hours or so asking the router if it can still keep using the same IP address (via DHCP), and it'll spend a few milliseconds every minute or two announcing on the local network that it is a device that can be controlled via HAP (HomeKit Accessory Protocol) - this is how your iOS device finds your HomeKit devices, by listening for these announcements. There's no other traffic to, or from, a HomeKit device unless you're actively doing something with/to it (i.e. no continuous traffic for a light _being_ on, only for a few milliseconds on the comparatively rare occasions when you tell it to turn on, or turn off). It would take many thousands of HomeKit devices on your network for their periodic announcements to add up to any noticeable fraction of your network traffic. Your Mac is generating orders of magnitude more traffic just having a few open tabs in a browser.

Thanks for that info, just as I was thinking about starting a Hue collection. We only have apple TV's for television source (except for an antenna in the attic for local news, rarely used), your example would be a great use-case for us.

 

[CarlJ]

If you don't mind, can you tell me which brand/lights are doing your 'green'? I steered away from Hue because I read many a complaint about its green color which is the most important color to me. The green lights in your pics look great and I was curious who made them.

For what it's worth, Hue's problems with green are with old equipment - Hue has had 3 generations of its main lights, and the first two did have a limited color gamut (with substantial omissions in green and some in lighter blues), but the current generation does green quite well. In the graph below (from here), the older generations of lights could reproduce colors in the red triangle, while the current generation of lights cover the blue triangle.