Smart lighting: the next generation

Smart light bulbs are, arguably, the cornerstone of the smart home. Switching lights on and off remotely is a gateway, it’s a primal thing that brings the whole process into focus for those who aren’t sure why they’d need to smarten up their home. There’s no great upheaval, no need to screw in anything new, no rewiring: you just install a bulb, hook it up to whatever system controls it, and your lights are smart.

‘Smart’ doesn’t just mean ‘remote’, either. Sure, the initial smart home, way back when, couldn’t manage much more than remote relays that lived outside the bulb, toggling the power to a lamp. But the move away from incandescent lighting, and away from CFLs, meant lights themselves became much smaller: the package which drives an LED bulb–the diode itself, along with the electronics and cooling required to drive it–makes up only a small part of the bulb itself. There is room to integrate network connectivity, so there’s often no need for any external hardware beyond that which you already own, and the small size and flexible nature of LEDs means they can