I’m looking for ideas/input on an idea that I had for a gender reveal. My wife and I are having a gender reveal party for our immediate family in a couple weeks and I just bought some Sylvania RGBW bulbs for the reveal. I put them in the pendants above our kitchen island. We also have a smart switch for can lights and under cabinet lights in the kitchen as well as a fan/light combo in the living room, a lamp, and control of the TV through Harmony. My thought was to set up an Alexa routine that flashes the lights and maybe changes the bulb colors a few times before ending on either pink or blue and having Alexa say the gender. Thoughts/inputs as to the best way to implement this?
A couple of people have done project reports for this use case. It’s typically just a matter of having the bulbs turn pink or blue.
The following one was particularly cute, I think, and used two light strips on a white Christmas tree. There’s a video so you can see the full effect. You can use the same idea but just use two different light fixtures. I especially like the way the effect is presented in this project because the lights are blinked between the two colors for one minute before settling on the final result. I think that builds the suspense and also gets people’s attention focused on the reveal device before it happens, so they don’t miss it. . 
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I also like your idea of having an echo announcement, which wasn’t possible at the time that project was done. I might add a little music first, again just to let people focus on the announcement device before it happens.
And congratulations to whoever is expecting the baby!
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Thanks for the input. I believe I did see the one you’re referring to. The Sylvania bulbs I just got are RGBW bulbs so I should be able to flash those back and forth between colors before settling on the genders color, or at least that was my goal. I was debating between music, if I can find a good fitting song, and a drum roll.
Drum roll works, too. 
Don’t do it during the days when ST rolls out updates 
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Days that end with a “y”?
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Yeah, I’m waiting for SmartThings to go down for some reason right when I want to do it.
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Started playing with this in routines in the Alexa app and am realizing everything triggers way to fast. Any idea on how to slow things down? Like how to put a couple second delay between each action? It appears Amazon let’s you add delays but 1 min is the minimum amount of time. Any other thoughts/ideas?
Routines in the Alexa app have a Wait action.
Yeah, sorry, I called it a delay but technically it’s called wait. However, the minimum wait time is 1 minute and I want something in the 5 second range. My thought is to set up several scenes with varying color to the lights and blink between the scenes a few times before landing on the gender color. I’m thinking 30-60 seconds worth total to build suspense.
Anyone know if stringify can control SmartThings scenes?
I don’t believe so, but you can create a virtual switch which starts the official smartlighting feature and use that to activate a scene, then just have Stringify turn on the virtual switch.
It’s starting to come together. Lots of trial and error and trouble shooting but I think it’ll be pretty cool. Hoping to get a video of it. Just not sure how I’d post it.
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Like everybody else, upload the video to YouTube or another sharing site and then post the link.
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Here’s a link to the final product:
Not the craziest thing but it really took quite a bit more trouble shooting than I thought to get it to work and everything to time out correctly.
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