Smart Light Bulbs? There’s an App for That!

By Mouser Electronics, www.mouser.com

When you go to the hardware store looking for a simple light bulb, you’re faced with a wide range of choices. First the type: incandescent, compact fluorescent, halogen, or LED? Then the hue: bright white, soft white, or cool white? Finally, power—the bulb energy efficiency—is it dimmable?  How much will it cost over time? These choices are limited by your choice of bulbs, and there are a lot of permutations. In the past, if you get it wrong or you changed your mind later, your only recourse was to change the bulb.

Not anymore. Philips Lumileds has just introduced hue, a web-enabled home lighting system that lets you control the color and brightness of your lighting from a mobile phone or tablet using Philips hue smart light bulbs. Hue lets you control the intensity and color spectrum of your lights from your iPhone®, iPad®, or AndroidTM smart phone or tablet. Although you can download the hue application for your phone or tablet for free, the Philips hue Connected Bulb Starter Kit sells for about $200, and is currently only available through Apple stores. The kit includes a wireless bridge and three RF-enabled bulbs with individual IP addresses—a bit more complex than your hardware store would want to handle.

The setup and operation are simple. Once you connect the wireless bridge that comes in the Starter Kit to your Wi-Fi router, you can separately control up to 50 different bulbs from your phone or tablet. You can set them all up for different configurations—for instance, bright white for reading or soft yellow to complement a favorite picture. You can even use the camera in your phone to automatically set exactly the right hue for the wall wash on your picture. Then using the phone or tablet application you can group the lights together in different configurations—for example, one for when you first arrive home, another for mealtime, and yet another for late evenings. You can create your own personal lighting environments and change all the lighting at once by simply tapping that configuration on your phone.  You can set timers for certain lights when you’re going out for the evening, and even turn off all the lights with a single touch when you go to bed.

Philips Lumileds LUXEON® Rebel ES LEDs offer superior >125lm/W efficacy that enables efficient & sustainable applications.

Hue bulbs output 600 lumens, roughly the equivalent of a 40W incandescent bulb, yet they draw only 8.5W each, which is 80% less energy than traditional bulbs. Color intensity ranges from 2000K to 6500K, covering all shades of white from warm to cold, in addition to a wide variety of colors.

Combining flexibility, ease of use, and infinite color mixing possibilities, the Philips Lumileds hue system opens up many possibilities for commercial applications, particularly in retail stores. Still, its most popular use may be in the home, where the only problem may be keeping the kids away from your iPad!