Blur Busters Forums

Does anyone here have experience with any wifi/bluetooth light bulbs?

I've been looking into the Flux and MagicLight bulbs that allow you to control them wirelessly with wifi or bluetooth depending on the model.

One of the big features they tout is dimming, but does anyone know if they use PWM? I've searched all over the internet for information on this but couldn't find anything.


Another thing I want to do is be able to control these through a PC, ideally with some sort of API so I can easily connect it to other home automation systems. There seems to be a lot more information available on the web for this, but if you have any experience with it I would like to hear about it.

There are many, but they tend to all be so expensive.

So I purchased a 5 pack of PlayBulb RAINBOW for $100 at a price of $20 per bulb. They behave as regular 40 watt white LED bulbs but they have R/G/B LEDs in them controlled by an Android/iPhone app, and I'm able to create really nice ambient colors with them, by touching a colorwheel on the screen of my iPhone (or iPad, which can also run the iPhone app). It is controlled by Bluetooth, and there's no PC app (yet) but in theory it could be controlled by a PC once the protocol is available or reverse engineered.

Some bulbs use high-frequency PWM to generate the colors, though as far as I know the Philips Hue bulbs do not (they are PWM free). Cheap color-tunable bulbs will use PWM and that is a concern.