Philips has been slowly updating their lineup of wireless Hue LED lighting the past few months. Last week, Philips announed HomeKit compatibility for the Hue system stating that all existing lights would be compatible. Now whether that means a new bridge is required (my strong guess would be yes!) or a software only update to the existing bridge, you will be able to voice control your Hue lights this fall.
And, now today, Hue announced new “beta” features for their Tap product that makes the device much more useful. Previously, you have 4 buttons to use for your Tap. You would assign these four buttons to existing scenes of your Hue system, and usually you’d want to have one of the buttons be an “all off” option. With Hue Labs, you now have two more options you can select for a button: a toggle and a dimmer.
Let’s start with the toggle feature first. With this feature you are able to assign a button to toggle a group of lights on/off. Novel concept, I know! :-) Prior to this, you could only assign a scene to a Tap button. The toggle feature now allows you to get away from scenes and access lights directly.
For the dimmer mode, you can set a button to control any number of lights within your Hue system and a push of the button will switch between three dimmer modes. For instance, I have four BR30 lights in our living room. Instead of having to to use 3 buttons to assign three different scenes for brightness, I can not assign one button to cycle thru three dim brightness levels.
As a fan of the Hue system, these two new features are welcome. Out of the two, I think the dimmer feature is the best. To me, this brings the Tap on par with products such as Lutron Caseta, where you had the abilty to dim lights directly from the switch. With the launch of Hue Labs, here is to hoping many new things to come!