Current (2016) status of colored lights

I’ve read a LOT of posts on the various RGB led bulbs out there and have a sizable collection of Hue and LIFX bulbs. I retired my Hues so I can’t comment on them yet but the LIFX seem to have the same issues as reported last year when controlled via ST. Most annoying problem is that if you try to change the color of multiple bulbs, only one bulb changes and it seems to only be to a horrible green. The other ones remain at whatever color they were previously, although dimming works well. I may dust off the Hues and see if they work this way as well. Obviously it would be great if colors and or temperatures worked as I love that feature of these lights. At first I thought it was a gimmick but it’s pretty cool and has lots of functional aspects. I don’t mind using an app for lighting effects (say for instance halloween) but was hoping to do as much as possible with ST.

I can’t really comment on the LIFX bulbs, but I’ve seen that complaint several times. They seem like great bulbs, but personally I prefer zigbee bulbs like Hue. If you do dust off the Hues, do you plan to connect them via the Hue bridge or directly to ST? (They aren’t officially supported when directly connected, but they work well).

If you’re going to use the Hue hub, I’d recommend looking into Hue (Re)Connect which is a community enhanced version of the Hue Integration that adds scene support.

If you’re thinking of going direct, then you might be interested in my custom DTH that incorporates color and white color temp, plus extra features like color loop and the blinking alerts.

As an update, the LIFX bulbs have been properly setting color temperature tonight or at least a lot more consistently. I haven’t changed anything though which is strange. I have noticed that if I use the LIFX android app to for instance change the color temperature to 5000, in a group of 4 bulbs one will almost always read 49xx while the others read 5000 in ST. The bulbs do appear to be a bit inconsistent with their states as well. I am going to try out the hue bulbs without the hue hub and see how this works. Anyway I am very impressed so far with the ST community. Not sure I can recommend the LIFX bulbs just yet.

In the off chance anyone is reading this…so far this is what I have discovered with the LIFX bulbs: color temperature commands will work for a group of bulbs but color change only affects one bulb. Dimming works well. I dusted off my Hue bulbs and tried them out. I haven’t been unable to factory reset them so I have used the ReConnect smartapp. It works but doesn’t support color temperature (only color). However it supports toggling of scenes so you can quickly set color and dimming level for a group of bulbs and that is a very big deal for me.

I somehow ended up including a Hue bulb directly to the ST hub while adding a new switch (I wasn’t aware that I hadnt used Hue to connect to it yet). The direct drivers work well but they also have a side effect. My bulbs were supposed to be just tunable to the white color spectrum but they also can adjusted to any of the rgb colors too. Interesting…