REVIEW – The holidays are approaching, which means new LED lights to consider! These Twinkly festive lights can be programmed in nearly any color and pattern using your smartphone.
What is it?
This Twinkly set is a 56 LED bulb string capable of displaying millions of colors. Scroll through preset patterns, or use the Android or iOS app to set and program your own patterns.
Hardware specs
- Lights for both indoor and outdoor use (IP44 certified and rain resistant)
- Dimensions: 28.2′ long total string; 18.4′ lighted section
- 100-240V 0.5A 50/60Hz
What’s in the box?
The 56 strand set comes with the power adapter, string LEDs and an instruction booklet.
Don’t like to program? No worries. The LED string works right out of the box. Just press the button on the controller to scroll through the pre-programmed settings.
Setup
The lights pair with your phone by wifi. In these screenshots (iOS) you can see the different preset patterns. You can even create your own patterns with your own colors and blinking pattern.
I was surprised to see a timer feature. I didn’t quite understand how, but the phone doesn’t need to be actively connected for the lights to turn on and off via the timer. To test this, I set a timer on and off time, and put my phone into airplane mode (wifi off, too). The lights still turned on and off at the right times.
Performance
Unless you really want to program something custom, there’s no need for the app. 56 LEDs isn’t a terribly large number, and isn’t as dramatic as this promotional .gif would let you believe.
I recorded how the LEDs look by cycling through the preprogrammed patterns.
What I like
Brilliant colors, tiny but bright LEDs will really brighten up your holiday season. Timer appears to work whether or not the phone is actively connected.
What needs to be improved
The 56 LED string may be a little short to decorate a large tree.
Final thoughts
I found myself playing endlessly with the different customizations, and concluded there’s probably a preset that’s good enough for you.
Price: $79.99
Where to buy: ThinkGeek and Amazon
Source: The sample of this product was provided by Twinkly.
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What a waste of money. These lights are expensive and you would expect them to work correctly. They worked last year beautifully. This year a firmware update popped up and now they no longer connect. Tried to call support and after spending an hour on hold, I gave up. Emailing them just gets you an endless circle of troubleshooting responses. THEY ARE NOW DEFECTIVE. I do not know what else to do but warn others of this poorly ran company.
“I was surprised to see a timer feature. I didn’t quite understand how, but the phone doesn’t need to be actively connected for the lights to turn on and off via the timer.” Really?
Maybe the timing parameters are downloaded to the controller and stored in some kind of persistent memory.
I was hoping to see a more technical description on the function of these lights. Are they part of an I/O network of some kind in which each light has it’s own “node” address and responds to serial data directed to it by the controller?
Thanks,
Tom Burkett
Each light must somehow be controllable, but not in any way outside the app that I’m aware of.