Showing posts with label smartbulbs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smartbulbs. Show all posts

Tuesday, 19 December 2017

How a LIFX Z strip looks behind stained glass

Here's a personal story; I was a stained glass artist for some years and have a few pieces in my home and office now.

LIFX have recently released their 'Z' multizone light strips. I must admit that at first I thought it was a bit of a novelty. I bought some because I had to add support to PeacockMedia's LIFXstyle app.

After playing around a bit and trying strips in various places, I tried lighting this particular stained glass panel in my office. I tried various placements before I tried sticking a metre of the stuff behind the thick vertical line down the middle.

 And here's how it looks after putting it back up and switching on:
It really works well, I'm chuffed to bits with it. But even better than that - you can change the light from warm white to cold white, and all the colours of the spectrum:


 At first, LIFXstyle (v3.0) was capable of switching the entire strip to the same colour / brightness. One of the great features of the lightstrip is that it's divided into 'zones' (hence Z, multizone). After a little work on LIFXstyle we were dialling up different colours / settings for each 'zone'.
 Version 3.1 allows you to mess around with colour and save the settings you like as a preset, apply cycling effects to the whole strip or parts of it. (An early version of 3.1 will be available very shortly.)

Finally, because I can't resist another picture, here are some pretty pastels.



Friday, 20 November 2015

Philips Hue bulbs, see your Hue-topia schedules as a gantt chart

The gantt chart mentioned in the previous post (as a new feature in LIFXstyle) is now built into Hue-topia
Hue-topia gives you a number of ways to schedule your lamps; groups, presets, dawn/dusk, and with a number of schedules set up, it may be difficult to see what's going on. The chart shows you any day or a week (bearing in mind that schedules can be set to happen on particular days).

It will be ready for beta testing soon. If you're interested in running it, please let me know.