I recently was excitedly posting about a lightbulb-speaker combination that had Wifi support, since it had become essentially a dream device of mine about 2 years ago. And just this week, that dream was finally completely realized with LightFreq.
LightFreq excites me in particular because it’s offering an open SDK for easy implementation with SmartThings and just about any other home automation system.
It’s, cheap, had speakers AND a mic in each bulb, to give you a home intercom system, along with color changing for millions of colors. It seems like they’ve ensured high quality sound in the bulb, my only fear is that they’re currently lacking in brightness, since the model they’re putting out now only outputs 800 lumens (60 watt bulb). However, it’s got my hopes up that they’ll soon have exactly the device I’ve been waiting for.
If this can be integrated with Smartthings, it could serve as a low cost alternative to Sonos. I can foresee using it to give lighted and verbal communications around the house, such as telling you when a door opens or giving you the weather report when unlocking the front door in the morning. Lots of potential uses.
Just a question, does anyone think that it would be possible to implement the mic system as a way of performing basic presence detection? More than anything I think this would be useful for alerting someone when their house is supposed to be empty and stuff is happening inside.
It should technically be possible (whether or not it is implemented is another story). It’s not through Smartthings, but my Foscam’s cameras can be trigger either by motion or by sound.
I jumped on the Kickstarter bandwagon for these. I am really interested in using the mic for voice commands… put one in each room and get full house voice control!