This year’s CES showcased some pretty cool new products. One of the standouts for me was Yeelight’s Smart Cube Lamps. A series of modular desktop ARGB magnetic cube lights available in a variety of configurations that include pixel lights, solid color panels and spotlights.
A standard kit includes four dot matrix pixel lights, a solid color panel, spotlight, base module and power cable for a retail price of $272 USD.
My standard kit shipped in a padded envelope with the individually boxed lights inside. Since the Yeelights are modular, you can customize until your heart’s content. Individual Smart Cubes range in price from $35-$39 USD directly from the company’s website and can be added on to your standard kit as your need for more lights increases.
The individual lights themselves are solidly built, all black plastic cubes with round magnetic connectors on two sides. The round connection enables the cube lights to stay connected while supporting a variety of configurations by changing the physical location of each light. A rubber insert is provided to cover up the magnetic port on the end of your array. Setup involves connecting the collection of cubes together along with their included base and plugging it into the wall. Unfortunately, my standard kit was shipped with a European 220v power adapter that was incompatible with North American’s 120v outlets. So I purchased this universal travel adapter on Amazon for the purposes of this review.
One of the big features of Yeelight’s smart lamps is Matter support. Matter is an open-source connectivity protocol that allows any Matter supported smart device to connect and communicate regardless of its ecosystem. This enables consumers to purchase smart home and IOT products without worrying about how they will connect and interact with their current smart home ecosystem.
Matter support also frees the Yeelight Smart Cubes to interact with a massive array of smart devices and respond appropriately. Using the Yeelight Station desktop app users can set up endless interactions to integrate with music, movies, games and virtually any on screen content from LEDs and color spots that respond to music or stock tickers and alerts to scrolling messages, clocks and even animated emojis.
I was disappointed to learn that YeeLight Station is only available as a Windows app and is currently not offered for Mac users. So I was unable to get hands on with the desktop app itself. However, the YeeLight Station smartphone app (iOS/Android) allowed me to pair my lights and connect them with my social media accounts like Youtube or Twitch, set customizable colors, light sequences, download community submitted artwork and even design my own images, color schemes and animations thanks to its built-in editor. But for more advanced integration, the Yeelight Station desktop app is definitely recommended.
I am having a blast interacting with these amazing little lights. I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit playing with light sequences, colors and animations and I can definitely see how this could become a seriously fun (if not expensive) obsession.
Note: our reviews are always 100% independent but Gearadical receives a small affiliate amount if you purchase the product on amazon.
