The intelligence of an LED bulb: the Internet creates the future of home smart lighting life

Thomas Edison tried 3,000 ideas to find a light bulb that could be sold. After a century, his electric lights were no longer so popular. Non-energy-saving incandescent lamps are no longer used in most parts of the world – at least the lowest energy standards are set to replace incandescent lamps. After the existing bulb is broken, consumers need to choose among a variety of options such as halogen, fluorescent or LED. In many ways, LEDs and the like seem to have more advantages: more energy efficient, longer life and faster lighting. But the last problem is that a light can cost as little as 25 cents at a grocery store near you. The energy-saving lamp is about $1.25, and the 60-watt LED is $20*.

* Incandescent lamps have been "cleaned up" out of the mainstream market. The author has roughly looked at Jingdong's offer. Energy-saving lamps can usually be bought at 10-20 yuan. LED lights are slightly more expensive. The cheapest ones can be bought at around 20 yuan. Obtained, as the power increases, the price will increase by tens of dollars, which is still more expensive than the energy-saving lamps.

Short oil, when you find that LED energy consumption is not significantly reduced than your energy-saving lamps, your electricity bills - the US Department of Energy estimates that LEDs certified by ENERGY STAR are lit up for 2 hours a day, costing 1 per year. The power of the dollar, under the same conditions, the energy-saving lamp costs $1.2.

But if you can have a light bulb, you will get the brilliance of the whole planet when you light it. How do you decide?

The most basic point is that it can only be reported as a simple light bulb, connected to the Internet, with its own IP address. When you press the switch, you can send a command to the light bulb to turn it on or off, or adjust to a specific brightness.

This doesn't sound much better than a traditional light bulb, but now imagine that every light in your room can be controlled via the web. With your tablet or smartphone, you can switch lights in specific rooms - even if you are not at home. You can set the time switch light, automatically turn off when you want to sleep, wake you up in the morning with soft brightness (not called). With multi-colored LEDs, you can adjust any color you want to adjust mood, party or assist in taking pictures.

Believe it or not, all of this is now possible with the first smart light bulb. Philips, Insteon (the home smart network protocol is the name) and GreenWave Reality will launch the first smart light bulbs that can be wirelessly controlled via iPhone/iPad. Since each bulb has a wireless communication module, they can work independently without being limited by the location of the wireless router. This bulb also supports Zigbee and Z-Wave's home automation system standards.

Still can't avoid the price, these bulbs are not cheap at all. Philips Hue LED lights are worth $199.99 (equivalent to about RMB 1,239) for three-color, and $29.99/only (for about RMB 187) for pure white. Well, Philips is as easy to use as possible for such advanced light bulb designs. “As long as you screw the bulb, you will use our system,” GreenWave Reality CEO Greg Memo told us.

We used Philips Hue and GreenWave Reality to test.

The basic installation is simple. Screw on the two light bulbs, connect to the home network cable, download the app from Apple's app store (Philips has a beta version of the Android app), and leave the rest to "smart". The bulb has been pre-paired with the cradle. If you are buying an extra bulb, you need to press the sync button to screw it on, and the pedestal will be included in the system.

The first thing to get used to is that you can't control the light bulb through the physical switch, because if you want the light bulb to remain "smart", you need to power it up because it has a control chip inside. If you use physical switches to control, they have to maintain the default factory state. Both GreenWave and Insteon have simple remote controls, but Philips can only be controlled from your smartphone. It sounds cool, but it's much more troublesome than the switch on the wall - especially when you walk into a "black house" that doesn't turn on the lights.

"Controlling the light bulb can also be annoying"

Despite the smartphone application, controlling the light bulb is a bit annoying. GreenWave's application design is very straightforward, you can adjust the brightness level of each bulb directly in the main control interface. You can also divide it into groups so that you can control it by room, either light or dark. The application comes with an example by default. If you need to set a time switch, or control the lights in multiple rooms, you need to do a "smart control", which is cumbersome. The biggest problem is that there is no feedback mechanism in all of these processes. It is often that I press a button, the light bulb will take a while to start adjusting, and occasionally the application loses its response (-.-Khan|||).

As for the application of Philips, there is no loss of response, but it is not particularly fast. Each bulb is set to the pull-up menu at the bottom of the screen and cannot be turned on at once. What's different is that Philips lets you create different "scenes": it's a screen-like interface like Photoshop, or simply change the color temperature to simulate incandescent/energy/lights; you can also Use the color picker to pick up colors from your photos. This is actually a party game at best, it is not as useful as a unified switch in the room.