People still love the look of incandescent bulbs. The Wyze color bulbs look beautiful, and have all the hardware features necessary to implement a “warm dim” feature, whereby the light color gets more orange as the dimmer value is turned down, like the natural colors of a tungsten filament.
The user interface could use either the color wheel or a numeric input in Degrees Kelvin. to let the user set up the feature. For example, at 100% brightness, the bulb could be set for 3000K, and at 10% brightness, 2200K.
I don’t know how the voltage is regulated in the control circuit inside the bulb, but if possible, it would be really nice to let the bulb operate on a standard dimmer, as well, and have a warm-dim feature. I think that if the bulb is being used on a dimmer, while dimmed, simply let the app know that the brightness is limited by the physical dimmer, and ignore user inputs calling for more brightness than that.
You just described the new “Sun Match” feature, although it’s fully automated when enabled. Am I correct in assuming you want a similar feature, but manually engaged and with user settings/preferences?
No, it is not quite the sun match feature, although it could be very similar firmware, just driven from the dimming slider instead of sun time, and the lookup table will be different. If you watch an incandescent bulb when you use a hardware dimmer on it. at full power, the tungsten filament is very hot, and emits light at 3000-4000K to my eye. As you pull down on the dimmer, less energy heats the tungsten filament, and it runs cooler, and emits light in the range of 2200K or lower, until it no longer emits light.
The color bulbs that I just installed do not have a sun match feature. There is a switch in the UI, but it apparently is a future feature that will require a firmware update beyond what is available now.
I think that if you could make the hardware work on a hardware dimmer and automatically do this feature, you would have an additional market.
Just realized, what I would really like to see is the dimming indexed to a standard LED compatible wall dimmer, such that the value of the current presented by the wall switch is translated to an equivalent smart bulb dimming value. Of course continuing to draw enough current to keep the smart module running is the tricky part.
And yes this is better than a regular bulb because one could still change temps etc.
Agreed. I think that what those dimmers send to the LED bulb is a pulse-width modulated signal. It is not a whole lot different than the signal from the old school wall dimmer, where a triac is triggered on at some phase angle, and turns off at zero crossing. It, in effect, is also a pulse-width modulated signal. The algorithm would be to take a time period, maybe one second, and measure the on-time vs the off-time to determine the value of dimming desired. This could be agnostic of whether the source voltage is PWM from a modern LED dimmer, which is more stable, or from an old-school triac dimmer.
And lots of reason it is better than an LED on a dimmer. Other features, such as vacation mode, reacting to a motion detection event, etc, etc.