Today you can manage your lighting in a way that was for a very long time, believed to be science- fiction.
You can have your smart lights answer to your presence, voice, or make use of your smartphone to control the lights in your house even when you are hundreds of miles away.
It may sound like something upcoming, but smart light technology is here with us now, and it will remain with us for a very long time.
What Is Smart Lighting
Smart lighting systems easily connect to a home wi-fi network and allow you to control your lights via a smartphone app. You can adjust the color temperature of single light bulbs or completely change the color.
You can put up schedules so that your lights can turn on and off at particular times. You can also activate your lights even when you are vacationing or on a long holiday to make it appear as if there’s somebody home, scaring off potential burglars.
Some smart lighting technology is compatible with other smart home automation such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. This means that you can use your voice commands only to control your lighting. And you will have a lot of creativity on how you want to use your lights.
What Else Can You Do with the app?
The app allows you to change the bulb’s brightness, and if your bulbs have colored LEDs, you can easily change their colors. This opens up a whole lot of possibilities. Let’s call them recipes.
You may choose one light recipe for dinner, watching movies, and reading. Changing from one recipe to the next is a walk in the park. It is as simple as yelling at your most preferred voice-activated personal assistant or tapping your smartphone.
Requirements for Smart Lighting Technology
Smart lighting technology uses mesh networking, where every smart bulb connects wirelessly to the next bulb. A hub that corks into your router controls the network, allowing some other networked appliances such as your tablet or phone to communicate with your smart bulbs effectively.
Some smart lighting systems have an away from the home mode that allows you to manage your lights even you are miles away from home. Away from home mode is especially useful if you just remembered that you accidentally left your lights on or you need to scare the baby sitter.
However, not all smart lighting systems need a hub. Some of them directly connect to your wi-fi network.
You can accessorize most smart lighting systems with additional items such as motion detectors or dimmers, link them to IFTTT (If This Then That) service to make complex rules.
These rules trigger specific recipes for particular things. Do you wanta flash of color to alert you when you have an instant message? Or a simple glow to tenderly break the news of the day’s weather forecast?
You can this and a lot more without tinkering too much.
What is the Future of Smart Lighting Technology?
Smart lighting technology will be a feature of the Internet of Things (IoT),a network of smart devices that are always connected to the internet.
A Vivid Picture
Picture setting this morning schedule through your smartphone:
Your alarm goes off, and you snooze it or switch it off with just a sleepy voice command.
A couple of minutes later, the lights gradually come on, or your window blinds roll up to entice you out of bed.
Your alarm sounds, and you switch it off (or snooze it) with a sleepy voice command. A few minutes later, the lights slowly come on, or the window blinds roll up to coax you out of bed. You hardly notice as the lights in every room activate as you teeter around your house trying to get ready.
The toast gets ready, and your coffee machine completes brewing as you get into the kitchen.
You take a few minutes longer than expected to take breakfast. Just before it reaches the time, you’ll encounter traffic, a very friendly voice tubes up, reminding you it’s time to leave.
Your vehicle switches itself on as the front door automatically locks itself behind you, and as you start driving away, your home lights dim slowly before switching themselves off.
Wrapping Up
Visualize this smart lighting technology across the entire city, where street lights turn on when the vehicles are nearby.
A smart city where we can sync the traffic lights with the cars approaching and the headlights of vehicles themselves tune themselves automatically to complement the conditions outside.
This is where smart lighting technology is heading in. An infinite interconnectedness has been created to make our lives more convenient.