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Review on ๐Ÿ”ฎ Twinkly Smart Custom LED String Lights โ€“ Special Edition with App Control โ€“ 250 RGB+W LED Lights โ€“ IoT Ready Customizable Lighting โ€“ Create or Download Light Displays by Autumn Campbell

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Love her but with some caveats.

This review is for 250 RGB+W Twinkly Lights (Special Edition) Gen 2 on cord, although I expect my comments to cover curtain or icicle lighting options as well as the regular RGB and gold option edition lights.Tl;dr Great lights, but with a big outlet and not connecting to networks with hidden SSID. The rest is almost perfect. First let me say that I love these lights! They are very cool and as you can see in the video they are the only decoration on our tree at the moment. The tree itself is big. Although not very tall, he is very round. Our tree this year is 7.5 feet tall (6 feet 10 inches tall with lights) and about 5.5 feet wide at the base. The tree has lights on all sides because it is in the center of the room. To achieve density, you can see in the video that they took 3 sets of lamps (750 in total). They are well packaged and I received 3 correct sets. I was a bit surprised to see that the lamps themselves are divided into 2 separate strings of 125 lamps but connected to a normal controller. This isn't a problem as there is about 6 feet of cord before the lights turn on, so there's enough cord to get it up the tree where you need it. While the installation process is similar to any other Christmas except you don't run them into a tree, they are strictly on the periphery for the application to easily find them later. in the form of a giant plug. You can only connect one because the connector will block the second outlet. If you have a regular power strip, you can most likely only connect two sets for the same reason. Because of this, I had to get a 3-pin hub with the connectors at right angles to each other. Once connected, they turn on and you can link them to the app. Open the app, press the button on the controller for a few seconds until the app detects it via Bluetooth. At this point you can add them to your WiFi network. That's the next big problem for me, there's no way to add a hidden SSID. All my smart devices are on the hidden VLAN, so I had to change my network settings to make them visible. I first tried the "built-in" standalone Twinkly WiFi option, but trying to connect multiple devices this way didn't work unless I wanted to control them all individually (i.e. no continuous effect through the have entire tree). Also, one of the controllers seemed to be preventing itself from connecting using this built-in method, and before I started the reset I simply made my IOT network visible to connect through that route. Once connected, it was easy to group them as a unit and name the group. Auto-compositing was surprisingly fast, and for the 3D effect, I had to step onto the balcony to frame the entire back of the tree, but that's okay. After adjusting, it was very easy to select and edit effects. You can also set an on-off schedule, which is nice. I'm not sure if they'll automatically reconnect if the power goes out or if they're unplugged, but once you've gone through this it should be easy enough to do it again.

Pros
  • Hands-free operation
Cons
  • Very expensive