Friday, December 18, 2015

Smart LED Lights — Not the Brightest Bulbs Yet, but Getting Smarter

You enter a room, you flip a switch and the light comes on.
For more than 130 years, the oldest electronic technology has astoundingly remained largely unchanged — until the recent advent of the “smart” LED bulb.

Instead of flipping a switch, you whip out your smartphone or tablet to wirelessly, via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, turn your smart LED lights on or off. But that’s not the “smart” part. With the smart bulb app, you can schedule your lights to go on or off on a programmed schedule and, in some cases, change color or tone to suit or create a mood.
But let’s get back to that first “smart” bit. How, exactly, is whipping out your smartphone to turn your lights on or off easier — or “smarter” — than simply flipping a switch?
It isn’t. If you think about it, the technology may be cool, but the function is purely Rube Goldberg.
Smart bulbs sometimes make controlling your lights more confusing. If you turn on a smart LED from a wall switch or the lamp itself, your smart bulb app may not be able to turn it off — you have to complete the on/off cycle either from the wall/lamp switch or from the app, not one from Column A and one from Column B. This switch/app control issue multiplies if you have multiple smart LED bulbs and some are on and some are off.
Despite this annoyance, smart LED bulbs will probably catch on anyway. After all, the light bulb is still the universal sign of a brilliant idea, and brilliant ideas are exactly what some LED bulb engineers are hatching for the next generation of “smart” LED bulbs. And one brilliant idea may eliminate light switch and smartphone on/off control entirely.

Unlike ancient incandescent and cold fluorescent, LED bulbs do not use chemical processes to create light. LEDs are light-emitting diodes, and use solid-state circuitry to create illumination.
LED bulbs are essentially PCs in a socket. As such, an LED bulb is a tabula rasa, a blank slate for clever programmers and engineers to create something more than a simple illumination device. Product designers are drooling over the opportunity to incorporate capabilities into an LED bulb currently performed by separate devices.
For instance, there have been a handful of LED bulbs that double as either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth speakers. Sengled, a 10-year-old Chinese LED firm, is selling its Bluetooth Sengled Pulse Solo and, early next year, the Wi-Fi Flex. Like the Pulse, Flex will have JBL speakers built into them, but also will be able to wirelessly access personal music libraries and Internet radio stations through Sengled’s iOS and Android app. Sengled also sells the Boost, a smart LED bulb with a built-in Wi-Fi repeater.

Sengled is adding more than speakers to LED bulbs. For instance, coming soon is the Sengled Snap. Essentially a DropCam in a bulb, Snap is an overhead flood with an integrated 140-degree wide-angle 1080p video camera.

A two-year-old Cambridge, Mass., startup called BeON is taking a more intriguing approach: A modular smart LED. Instead of a traditional bulb-shaped bulb — there’s no reason an LED bulb has to be bulb-shaped; it’s merely a matter of maintaining form familiarity — BeON has gone all Henry Moore on us. Its “bulbs” have a rectangular hole through their middle into which can be inserted specific function modules.
BeON’s first modular smart LED bulb product is the Home Protection System, a three-bulb kit with yellow modules with built-in microphones so the bulb can hear what’s going on around it and react. For instance, BeON’s LED lights can flash in a preprogrammed sequence if they hear the smoke alarm, CO2 alarm or the doorbell ring.
The BeONs also can supply four hours of emergency lighting in case of power outage, thanks to an integrated e-battery that charges whenever you turn your lamp on.
Along with speakers, cameras, Wi-Fi repeaters and microphones, it won’t be long before smart bulbs incorporate smoke and CO2 detectors, air fresheners, sonic pest repellents, cell signal boosters, or any other single or combination of heretofore dedicated-function devices.

There still remains the on/off-switch/app conundrum. If these LED bulbs are so smart and can include microphones, why can’t we just tell them to turn on or off?
You can, sort of. You can tell both the Hue and Insteon smart lights to turn on and off via new hubs that create separate connections to Apple’s HomeKit, Android’s Cortana and Amazon Echo’s Alexa voice-control systems. Just enunciate the appropriate command to one of these voice systems, and after a few seconds of communicating with their respective cloud intelligence, your lights come on or turn off.
But why should smart bulbs need a Cyrano? Soon they won’t. At the upcoming CES, Sengled will announce Sengled Voice, a Wi-Fi smart LED bulb with dual microphones and dual JBL speakers — essentially Siri, Cortana and Alexa in a socket. You’ll be able to speak to the Voice bulb to not only control its lighting, but get answers to questions, listen for alarming sounds such as breaking glass or crying babies, or perform other as-yet unspecified smart home tasks, all with no additional third-party system required.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Singles Day sales push down LED light bulb prices in China in November, says LEDinside


The global average price of 40W LED replacement light bulbs fell 3.4% on month to US$10.80 in November, while 60W counterparts saw a 3% drop to US$14.60.
LEDinside analyst Allen Yu said that the price decline for LED lighting products in November was more significant in China because of online promotional activities during the Singles Day sales. In the Europe and US markets, prices returned to downtrend during the same month after experiencing an uptick in October. As for China's LED package market, demand has been picking up compared with the third quarter but still lags far behind expectations. Currently, the downtrend in the China package market is caused mainly by the decline of mid- and high-power LED package products. The room for further price reduction is relatively smaller for standard LED package products.
LED package prices have fallen each month since the start of 2015, with decline being most noticeable in the standard package segment. Mid- and high-power LED package products are still seeing rapidly falling prices. In particular, more makers are producing 0.5W 2835 LED products due to rising demand. As a result, the average monthly decline of the products reached 3.3% in November and was responsible for the overall price drop for mid- and high-power LED package products. Yu pointed out that the present recovery of LED industry has not been as smooth as initially believed, and makers are still suffering low capacity utilization. In the short term, Yu expects price slump to persist in China's LED package market.
During November, 40W-equivalent LED light bulbs saw the steepest price decline in China as local lighting companies had lowered their prices in that regional market in response to Singles Day sales. The monthly decline in China thus reached 9.9%. Prices in the UK and Germany swung sharply downward after a significant recovery in October, with monthly declines respectively at 5.2% and 7.2%. In Japan, the monthly drop was 3.4% because some products were on promotion there.
As for the prices of 60W-equivalent LED light bulbs during November, monthly decline in China reached 7.9% due to local lighting companies cutting prices during the Singles Day sales. International lighting companies also substantially lowered their prices. In the UK, 60W-equivalent LED light bulbs suffered a relatively large monthly decline because of most of these products were promotion there as well. By contrast, prices in Germany and Japan fell 4% and 2.7%, respectively.