![]() ![]() All commands go from the remote to the Hub via RF, so there’s no need to point the remote at anything in particular. Make no mistake - this is the smart bulb to beat.The Harmony Elite consists of a candy-bar-style remote control with touchscreen, a charging cradle to recharge the remote’s batteries, the AC-powered Harmony Hub, and two IR blasters that plug into the hub. By focusing on wide third-party compatibility, strong ease of use, and a low price point, Cree's positioned its Connected LED to move the needle, just as the company did with LEDs at large back in 2013. Smart lighting is one of the clearest inroads to wider smart home adoption. ![]() That makes buying now and automating later a reasonable approach, so long as your home doesn't use dimmer switches. Even if you aren't sold on the smart home yet, Cree's Connected LEDs only cost a few dollars more than non-connected competitors, and perform well even when you aren't putting their smarts to work. You'll need a third-party hub in order to control the bulbs, but you've got a good range of options at this point, and Cree meshes well with all of them. At $15 per bulb, it offers better value than the Osram Lightify and Connected by TCP starter kits, a much better value than Belkin's WeMo LEDs or the Philips Hue Lux LEDs, and better performance than the equally affordable GE Link LED, too. I was especially happy to see the app do well with geofencing automations that detected when my phone entered or exited the area immediately around my apartment - these types of automations didn't work out so well when I tested the Quirky Aros Smart Air Conditioner last year.Ĭree's original LED leapfrogged much of the competition when it debuted in the beginning of 2013, and now, the Cree Connected LED looks primed to follow suit. In my tests, the Robot automations worked perfectly as far as Cree's bulbs were concerned. You can set your lights to turn on or off whenever certain conditions are met - arriving at home, or triggering a motion sensor, for instance. ![]() Other platforms offer controls that are similar, if not borderline identical.Īutomation is also pretty painless thanks to Wink's Robots feature, which does an excellent job of walking you through the process. Basic control of the lights is intuitive - just tap a bulb to turn it on or off, or swipe right or left to dim it up or down. Once your Wink Hub is up to date and your bulbs are paired, the app experience is a good one. In the example above, the lights turn off automatically whenever I leave home, provided I've got my phone with me. You'll be able to automate your Cree lights using Wink's Robots. Sounds simple enough, but it took several attempts on three different Wi-Fi networks before I could finally get the update to install correctly. Wink required me to update the hub to the newest firmware before it'd let me add Cree bulbs to my setup. The one issue I did experience during the pairing process had nothing to do with the bulbs themselves, but instead, with the hub. The GE Link LEDs I tested last year each took several attempts before they'd pair successfully, which got real frustrating real quick. ![]() That's a great result, and also a relief, quite frankly. Pairing the bulbs worked on the first try in each and every one of my tests, and never took longer than a minute from start to finish. Connecting Cree's smart bulbs with the Wink app was an easy process: just tell the app you want to add a Cree Connected LED to your setup, then turn the bulb on when it tells you to. Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNETĭespite compatibility with multiple platforms, Cree still prints pairing instructions with Wink right on the packaging. Pairing Cree's LED with Wink takes less than a minute, and each bulb we added paired on the first try. The Cree Connected LED hits a rather ordinary score of 80 out of 100, and given that both the WeMo LED and the equally inexpensive GE Link LED hit closer to 90, I'd have liked to see Cree do better. The one place where Cree's smart bulb lags behind at least some of the competition is the color rendering score, which measures how accurately a given light source illuminates different shades. At 2,696K, the Cree Connected LED lands closer to the mark than any other smart bulb we've tested, so if you're picky about that perfect shade of warm, yellowy light, you'll like this LED. SmartThings, Revolv, Staples Connect, IFTTTĬree also did a very good job with color temperature here, landing extremely close to the stated 2,700K. Wink, SmartThings, Hue Bridge, Staples Connect Wink, Hue Bridge, SmartThings, Staples Connect Additional color temperatures (price difference) ![]()
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