Open the pod bay doorsā¦and turn the lights blue. Part One - The User Experience
I can tell my house to turn all of my lights on and off. I can use my voice to address them individually. I can change the brightness and the colour. And it works, it really does. Itās the future. Weāre here.
tl;dr: The LIFX wifi bulbs are a viable solution for complete home lighting and controlling them by voice with an Amazon Echo is probably the ākiller appā that makes them worthwhile. The Schlage Sense lock is OK as an electronic lock but doesnāt deliver on itās HomeKit connectivity promises. The integration of a Logitech hub with other smart home systems is pretty good. Sonos has a great sound system and the Apple Music integration is very well done. The single biggest challenge with all of this is that most home wifi routers can only handle about 25 devices, something almost universally overlooked in any discussion of IoT or smart homes.
Over the past 6 months Iāve had the opportunity to renovate a newly-purchased apartment and build-in a number of āsmart homeā devices including lights, door locks, sound and entertainment systems and a voice controller for them all. This is the story of what Iāve done and how I did it. Itās a pretty in depth review of some aspects of the system but Iāve broken it into two parts. In the first part Iāll focus mainly on the user experience. In the second, Iāll go into detail about how I set it up and comment on some of the technical problems and limitations Iāve encountered. Iām particularly motivated to do the latter because some parts were actually a lot harder than Iād imagined. Hopefully by bringing a few different bits together I can help someone else setup their own system.
Our āSmart Homeā
In late 2015 we bought an apartment in South Melbourne and undertook a reasonably substantial renovation. This gave us the opportunity to change all of the light fittings and completely re-do the lighting layout in every room. The apartment has 2 bedrooms and a bathroom on the top level; a lounge, dining room and kitchen on the middle level and an entrance to the street and garage on the lower level. The total living space is about 80 square metres (860 square feet or about 9 squares). The products Iāve integrated (so far!) are 24 LIFX smart lights, a Schlage Sense door lock, 2 Sonos sound systems, a Logitech Harmony Elite hub, 2 Amazon Echoes as well as the Yonomi and IFTTT apps.
Lighting - LIFX
When we bought it, the apartment had 43 internal halogen downlights plus 4 external lights on the top balcony. 43 lights in what is effectively a 6 room apartment was overkill and the halogen downlights did a very poor job of lighting the house anyway. To make things even worse, from both a practical and an energy efficiency point of view, large banks of lights were connected to single switches. In the kitchen, for example, the four ceiling-mounted downlights plus two hanging pendant lights were all on a single switch.
I first heard about LIFX bulbs at a Startup Victoria Meetup event a few years ago. LIFX are an Australian company that launched their product via a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Every LIFX bulb has an array of LEDs and its own built-in WIFI chip that enables you to control the operation, colour and brightness of every light individually. There are plenty of reviews out there about LIFX bulbs so I wonāt go into great detail about their operation. However, every review Iāve read has only really considered one or two lights and often just in a lamp. This review, for example, while very good, concludes that having a smart light in a bathroom is not really useful. As Iāll explain, by considering the LIFX bulbs as a total home lighting system that is integrated with voice control, I do believe that they can be useful in every room. I think itās a very important distinction to consider replacing every light in the home and I also think itās useful to review them after several months of use rather than several hours or days.
As they are LEDs, the LIFX bulbs are very bright and pretty efficient. We replaced 43 dim, inefficient, 50W halogen bulbs with 20 11W LIFX LED bulbs (plus a further 4 that we put on the balcony). This reduced our power consumption by lights by almost 90%, a huge saving. The LIFX Color 1000 is capable of all colours plus white while the LIFX White 800 is limited to just the various shades of white. We have a mix of both. Most of our lights are coloured but the lights in the stairways, powder room and laundry are just white. Each light puts out a maximum brightness of around 1000 lumens when on a neutral white. In my experience, this means that most rooms only need one or two bulbs where 4 or even 8 halogens might have been required.
The best thing about the LIFX bulbs is their wireless control. If you just install them in a lamp or use them for a few days then the act of turning your lights on and off with your mobile phone may not seem to be that useful. However, weāve now had them in place for 6 months and I can definitely say that having the entire house lit by wirelessly controlled lights does completely change the way you interact with lights. When you think about it, turning on a light switch is a pretty clunky way of doing things. The outcome youāre seeking is light but the action you have to undertake is walk to a specific place and hit a switch. Often that switch is well inside the room that you want to light so you have to walk in the dark to turn on the light. What the LIFX bulbs enable you to do is to control the light where you are going to be or where youāve been, rather than just where you are. For example, when we arrive home we can pull out the phone and quickly turn on lights to areas such as the stairs, lounge and kitchen. We can even do this over the cellular network, the app doesnāt have to be connected to our home wifi to control the lights.Ā
The LIFX iOS app supports widgets so you can put your favourite lights in a screen that can be accessed even while itās locked. It just takes a small swipe down from the top of the screen and you can access the groups. Another example is when you go to bed. I always have my iPad beside the bed to read at night and I can simply go to bed and any lights that are on can be turned off once Iām in bed. The reverse applies in the morning, I can turn on the lights from the bed so I can see where Iām going before I leave the room.
Lights can be grouped into whatever combination makes sense and are not bound by the electrical connections to the lights. For example, I can group the lights at the top and bottom of my stairs into a single group. What would normally require two, separate, physical switches can now be achieved with one button in the app. Addressing each light individually also means that I have increased flexibility with regards to which parts of a room are lit. For example, in the living room I have four lights in a square that are grouped together. However, I can use the LIFX app to only turn the back two lights on (when watching TV for example). Combinations of lights, including colours and brightness, can also be saved as specific scenes so you can have a whole range of specific setups available for activation in the LIFX app.Ā
The app also has built-in timers so you can trigger lights, groups or scenes at pre-determined times. You can even link these times to sunrise and sunset so the actions occur at a different time each day. For the balcony lights I have them set to come on 10 minutes before sunset and go off at 11pm, thus combining a variable and an absolute time in the same program. You can be as creative and as random as you like with programs and can even manually turn lights on and off from anywhere in the world. As a security measure to make your home look occupied, this is so far beyond a lamp plugged into a mechanical timer.
The ability to change colour is a key feature of the LIFX bulbs and they claim that 16 million colours are possible. Many reviews highlight that competing bulbs (such as the Philips Hue) donāt do a good job with all colours and are not as bright. To achieve their range, LIFX bulbs have red, green, blue and white LEDs. At full brightness all LEDs are used so the colours of the lights are somewhat washed out. Once the brightness is turned down to 50% (or lower) the white LEDs are not used so all colours appear very rich. Indoors, I donāt use the colours very often but outside, on the balcony, Iāve setup a nightly purple scene and have also got a green and gold scene that I can activate after Australian sporting victories. One thing I wouldnāt recommend with the colours is putting guacamole in a purple-lit room. Green turns a very awful brown colour under purple light and thereās no way people will put that on their corn chips!
While the colours are fun the various whites (from cool to warm) are probably more useful day to day. With normal LEDs it is often a difficult choice as to how cool or warm the bulbs should be. Furthermore, differences in bulbs can easily mean that different LEDs in the same room can have slightly different colour temperatures. With normal LEDs, once youāve chosen the colour youāre stuck with that. With LIFX bulbs, the colour temperature of the white can be adjusted between 2500 and 9000 K. When I first installed the lights it was summer in Australia so having very cool white lights (7000 K) made the apartment feel very bright and modern. However, as we moved into winter I found the cool white too stark so I shifted the colours to 5500 K, a warmer white. Colour temperature definitely changes the way you feel in a room and having the ability to vary this at the press of a button is amazing.
Another feature of having smart lights is that the functionality of the bulbs can be increased by changes to the app or cloud-based service. In the past few months LIFX have added a number of new features to their app. It is now possible to revert back to the previous colour or setting for a light and to copy and paste colours from one light to another. Each light also has a timed dimming feature that can be accessed by a long press on each light in the app. This brings up a menu that enables you to gradually dim the light over time. For example, itās possible to set a bedroom light to slowly dim over time.
Setting up the lights was fairly straightforward. The main difficulties I encountered were due to overloading our wireless router with devices and Iāve also found upgrading the firmware on 24 lights to be a fairly tedious process. Iāll go into detail about these issues in Part Two of this blog.
Other smart devices - lock, hub and sound
Apart from the lights Iāve also installed a few other smart home devices. On the front door I installed a Schlage Sense door lock. This is a wireless door lock that also has an electronic keypad and a physical key. Having 3 ways to get in was essential to me choosing this lock. This is our only external door and I wanted to make sure it was both secure and reliable. Unlike the lights, the lock is battery powered so it uses Bluetooth to communicate, not wifi. This means itās quite slow to make a connection. The Schlage lock does support Appleās HomeKit protocol which, in theory, means that I should be able to access the door from anywhere, via wifi or a cellular network. To do this, the lock needs to be within range of an Apple TV. HomeKit uses the Apple TV as a hub, making a Bluetooth connection between the lock and the Apple TV which then enables connection over the internet. I have a Gen 4 Apple TV that is about 8 metres from the lock (within the recommended range) but the lock doesnāt connect to this. I therefore put a Gen 3 Apple TV even closer, about 3 metres away. This does connect but itās extremely slow. If I access the lock using the Schlage app over wifi it can take several minutes to find the lock. So, the idea of being able to check if the door is locked from anywhere in the world, which sounds great, doesnāt actually work. When I am within direct Bluetooth range of the lock I can make a connection with my iPhone or Apple Watch (via the iPhone). So it definitely does work that I can say āSiri, unlock the doorā to my watch and the door will unlock.Ā
However, in practice, I need to be standing in front of the door for at least 10 seconds before the Bluetooth connection is established. In that time it is quicker just to use the PIN on the electronic keypad. I understand that the connection strength is limited by the lock being battery powered but, at present, the Schlage lock doesnāt deliver on some of its key promises. Having a lock with an electronic keypad is though, still very useful. Most days, I leave the home with no key at all and am confident that I can get back in.
The next device I setup was a Logitech Harmony Elite hub. This hub facilitates the use of a single, universal Bluetooth remote control that can connect to my TV, Apple TV and satellite TV box. Having a Bluetooth remote means that you donāt have to point the remote at the device and the satellite box can be stored out of sight in a cupboard. The remote can be customised to initiate multiple functions with a single button press. For example, I have a single button that turns the TV and Apple TV on and sets the TV to the correct source. A separate button does the same for the TV and the satellite box. The Harmony Elite can also connect to the LIFX bulbs so, if Iām watching TV and the remote is the easiest thing to access, I can use that to turn specific lights on and off. In general the remote works ok. It does rely on IR transmitters to communicate with the TV and occasionally the TV doesnāt respond. However, pressing āhelpā forces the remote to try again and it generally gets it right. The Bluetooth remote does lag very slightly but the supplied remote for our satellite box (a Foxtel IQ3) does this too. Logitech also have an iOS app that enables you to access all of the features of the physical remote via your iPhone or iPad. In practice, this also takes a while to connect and I rarely use it. Overall, Iām happy with the Harmony Elite as a universal remote control but, as with the door lock, some of the promised features donāt quite work as well as they should.
The final connected devices Iāll comment on are my two Sonos sound systems. Iāve had one of these (a Play:5) for several years but recently bought a second Play:5 so that I now have one on each level of the house. There are many reviews online of Sonos speakers so again, I wonāt go into great detail. However, itās important to note that the Sonos speakers are true wifi speakers. They donāt use a Bluetooth connection which needs to be specifically activated every time you wish to use the speaker. Having a wifi connection means that the speakers are always on and I can play any music from my computer, my iPhone, my iPad or my entire Apple Music collection, anytime I want. I can control each room separately or group them so that the same music plays throughout the whole house. The integration of Apple Music (subscription required) into the Sonos app means that I can play almost any song, any time, anywhere in my home. The sound quality of the speakers is amazing too and Sonos now lets you tune the speaker using an iPhone so the speaker is actually optimised for the room it is in.
Smart home apps - Yonomi and IFTTT
With the emergence of a wide range of smart home devices a number of apps have appeared that attempt to link them all together. To date, Iāve only tried Yonomi on my iOS devices. Yonomi will connect to all of the devices Iāve mentioned here, the lights, lock, entertainment hub and the speakers. A key feature of Yonomi is that you can combine many different actions and devices into a single ārecipeā that can be triggered by an action or an event. For example, I can create an action that will turn the TV and satellite box on and adjust the lights to a āTV modeā. In theory, I can also have an action that turns on certain lights when my iPhone arrives at home (as signalled by its GPS position). These sort of recipes can be enhanced by linking them with another online service, If This Then That (IFTTT). IFTTT allows you to create recipes of your own or modify recipes made by others to trigger a whole range of multi-device actions. Online reviews highlight how you can have your lights flash a certain colour if you get an email or a social media message or in response to events such as sport or weather. I even read about recipes that can flash lights or play sounds (through Sonos) when bizarre things such as a spacewalk or a US Presidential bill signing takes place. Personally, I havenāt found the need to do any of these things so my use of IFTTT has been limited to a single recipe that turns my TV and satellite box on. As devices and connections improve Iāve no doubt that services such as IFTTT and Yonomi will become more important.
Voice Control - Hello Alexa
I realise that this blog is already pretty long but if youāve stuck with me this far, keep going, this is definitely the best bit! After setting up all of the devices I described above, the main way of interacting with them was via my iPhone. This was ok and certainly useful but for a while Iād been reading about Amazonās Echo, an internet-connected speaker/microphone that lets you control things using your voice. The Echo is still not officially available to Australians and until earlier this year it only really worked with a select range of smart devices so I wasnāt that tempted by it. However, when Amazon began opening up their system LIFX were quick to enable direct control of the lights by the Echo. This triggered (geek pun intended) me to buy two Echoes, one for each level of our house. The result was even better than I imagined.
The Amazon Echo works by constantly listening for a trigger word - āAlexaā (you can change that to āEchoā if you happen to be named āAlexaā). When it hears āAlexaā it records the next audio fragment and sends this to a a cloud-based server that analyses it for commands. When it recognises a command, certain hardware or audio responses are triggered. For the lights, this means that I can say āAlexa, turn the kitchen onā and the kitchen lights come on. Itās truly amazing. There are many reviews online that detail what Alexa can do but the short video at the top of this blog shows some of the key things I use the Echo for. I can ask Alexa about the weather or to play music or the radio. I can add things to a shopping list that then appears in the app on my iPhone. Alexa can set alarms, tell jokes, answer some trivia questions and play some simple games. I can use the Echo to activate the IFTTT routine I described above so I can say āAlexa, trigger TV onā and the Echo will send that command to IFTTT which will then send signals over the internet to the Logitech hub to turn my TV and satellite box on.
The Amazon Echo even further enhances the functionality of the LIFX lights. As with the LIFX app, lights can be added to groups but, unlike the LIFX app, lights can be in more than one group at once. So, I have groups called things such as āLiving Roomā and āKitchenā but I also have another one called āFirst Floorā. So, when I want, I can turn individual rooms on and off but, at the end of the night, I can walk upstairs and simply say āAlexa, turn the first floor offā as I walk up the stairs and any lights that are on downstairs will be switched off. You can dim and change the colour of the lights using voice commands although the latter requires slightly more specific language. While I can turn lights on and off with commands as succinct as āAlexa, bedroom onā, if I want to change colour I have to say āAlexa, tell LIFX to make the bedroom blueā.
The Amazon Echo is amazingly responsive. The service records, sends, analyses and acts on audio commands very rapidly. For the lights, itās generally about 2 seconds from when I finish speaking to when the light comes on, you can check the video if you want to be precise! This is obviously much quicker than walking to a switch and, as I mentioned earlier, it completely changes the way you interact with lights. With the Echo, I simply walk around the house telling Alexa to do things. I can turn lights on and off in distant rooms, I can action things while my hands are full and once you get used to the volume and tone of voice that the Echo most easily understands, the success rate of getting things done is very high.
I mentioned earlier that the Echo is not yet officially available to Australians. This is because some of the key features, such as ordering goods directly from Amazon, only work in the US. I go into these issues and describe how I bought the devices in Part Two of this blog.
Conclusion
As a kid, I always dreamed of having music everywhere in the house and now I own one where that happens. Controlling smart things via apps or voice is an amazing experience and, despite the minor drawbacks Iāve identified, Iām very happy with the devices I have. The LIFX bulbs and the Amazon Echo, in particular, are life changing and I definitely believe that voice control is the killer app that makes wifi lights truly useful. The functionality of these devices, particularly the Echo, is constantly being updated by changes at the server end so itās certain that more and more features will be added over time. As for whatās next? Well, our air conditioners, the garage door and garden watering systems are all things that Iād love to āsmarten upā. Itās probably pretty clear that Iām a big fan of all of this and am very excited by what will come next. I also remain optimistic that Alexa wonāt go the way of HAL and one day refuse to open the pod bay doors.


















