CololightSmart Lighting System (Extension) RGBW Alexa, Google Home

Have to say absolutely awesome lights but please read this as I have been hooked on these lights very educative If you are just using three lights just a normal usb plug is fine 1a is fine works great But when you add more say 12 above this is were you will get problems ie crashes found the problem you need a usb plug at least 2a or even better 3a this will sort the crashes out I’ve been using the lights for several months what you can do with various colour combinations is breath taking highly recommend

You could write these off as a cheap alternative to Nanoleaf, however they have more of a "lamp" aesthetic if that's what you're going for. These are 'IOT' lights that work well as an alternative to a lamp, they can be programmed using Google, Alexa, or IFTTT. Note that Alexa has very basic settings for controlling the Cololights, frustratingly, it can only pick from a select palette of solids colors, blue, green, etc and it doesn't quite have the oompth of the advanced colour options. If you want to get down to the granular settings you'd have to open the Cololight app and that's where things get a bit more shadey. The app itself is fine, relatively easy to use; you swipe left and right to go through solid colours, pre-set colour compilations, mix and matching as you go. There are some really nice combinations, and you can even make your own using the programming tool, but the big problem is that there is a time lag between selecting an option and the lights reflecting the choice made. The 'Official Lab' even gives you video previews of the options, however selecting these options can sometimes take up to a minute to propagate and I've found they fail quite often, leading me to keep the phone screen open, mashing the 'apply' button over and over until it either works, or it doesn't. When it's at it's worse (I assume it's server issues) it can be a bit annoying, but it's really not the end of the world. I've set them to come on from 9am with a nice sky blue hue, and I usually change them to the 'fire theme' from the official lab in the evening, creating a little area of the room that looks like there's a fire burning, in a, you know, millennialel "I can't afford Nanoleaf" sort of way.