Aqara has released a new Zigbee RGB smart light strip called the T1 LED strip. It costs $49.99, requires an Aqara hub, and is compatible with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT. When paired with certain hubs, including the Aqara Hub M2, the light strip also supports the Matter smart home protocol.
The T1 is one of the few light strips to support Apple’s adaptive lighting feature, and the only one to support both adaptive lighting features. and Affair. Does not support adaptive lighting through Matter, unfortunately; nothing does. Still, it’s nice to see new Matter-compliant lighting hit the market using the robust Zigbee standard. (What happened to that Hue-to-Matter bridge, I wonder?)
The adaptive lighting support of the 6.6ft (2m) long light strip means you can set it to automatically adjust its colors throughout the day to be warmer or cooler depending on the time. The only other light strips that support Apple’s circadian lighting feature right now come from Hue and Eve (also the Former Nanoleaf Essentials pull, that doesn’t, er, matter).
However, as I said, connecting the Aqara Strip T1 to Apple Home using the Matter protocol instead of the traditional way means you’ll lose adaptive lighting, as the still nascent “universal” smart home standard doesn’t currently support it. The nice thing is that unlike Nanoleaf’s Matter Essentials strip, which only it supports Apple Home via Matter, and therefore doesn’t support Adaptive Lighting at all – Aqara’s Apple HomeKit certification means you don’t have to give that up.
The T1 is an RGBIC strip, which means it can display multiple colors simultaneously (unlike old-style light strips that can only display one color at a time). Also, Aqara says that each of its ten segments is addressable, so you can control them individually by changing colors, though that doesn’t apply to the tunable white light portion of the LEDs, which applies to the entire strip at the same time. time.
Finally, like other colored smart bulbs and light strips from companies like Govee, you can set custom effects within the Aqara app if you want to display fun meandering gradients or flashing colors; You can even sync up with music using a built-in microphone. .
The IP44 rated Aqara T1 Cuttable LED Strip is $49.99 and a 1 meter extension kit is $14.99. Is available on amazon in the US, Canada and several European countries and at other retailers listed on their “Where to buy” page.
