Do you want to get more out of your smart lights? You’re enjoying the energy-savings. Perhaps you already have automation set up to turn them on and off at certain times. Maybe you have schedules making it so that the lights are different tones and levels of brightness at different times of the day. There are countless things you can do to take full advantage of your smart light’s features. Here are three unique uses for smart lights you may not have thought of before.

1. Enhance Your Doorbell

Sometimes, it’s nice to take a break from technology. With everything connected to your phone, it can be easy to feel like you need to have it with you all the time.

If you’re playing with your kids, you might want to cut ties with technology so they can have your full attention. You ordered dinner through Doordash, but you know from experience that you can’t hear the doorbell from the basement playroom. Without your phone, you won’t get a notification from your Ring Video Doorbell, either. Since you have smart lights, you can set up a way of getting notified without being interrupted by all the other notifications that come in before dinner arrives. Before playtime, create a rule for the lights in the playroom that will let them act as a secondary doorbell. You could have them blink blue three times or something similar when the doorbell rings. This will let you know dinner has arrived without cellphone interruptions.

Perhaps you want an easier way of notifying your teen that their friends have arrived for their weekly game night. You could text your teen or go down to their room to inform them in person, or you could save yourself needing to do either by setting the smart lights in their room to indicate when the doorbell rings. They might not want their lights acting as a doorbell every other day of the week. You can set the rule to only take effect on that day within the timeframe their friends usually arrive during.

You could also use this to have the lights on the patio flash to tell you when guests have arrived for the barbecue you’ve been outside cooking and other similar scenarios.

2. Budget Friendship Lamp

Over the last few years, much of society has come to understand the importance of connection in a new way after all the time we’ve been isolated and otherwise apart. Whether you have a friend who moved to the other side of the state, family in a different part of the country, or a long-distance relationship with someone on a different continent, you want to have ways of staying connected to the people you love. Perhaps you send texts, have phone and video calls, send emails, and see what they’ve been doing through social media. In addition to these more conventional means, friendship lamps have been gaining popularity.

The concept is to have two connected lamps. When one user touches their lamp, the second lamp will light up wherever it is in the world, so long as it has power and a Wi-Fi connection. This serves as a simple way of letting someone know you are thinking of them. This can be cute and sentimental, but it’s also expensive. The lamps are around $100 apiece, $200 for a set.

You could set up friendship lamps using smart lights as a more affordable alternative that can be just as meaningful. Start by getting lamps, either a matching set or by finding lamps for each other. Then, put color changing smart lights in them. Using the app’s sharing settings, share your bulbs with each other. From there, you can create different scenes to indicate specific messages. Pink could mean “thinking of you.” Blue could mean “I miss you.” Yellow could mean “I hope you have a great day.” When you want to activate your friend’s lamp, go into the app and tap the scene named after the message you want to share.

You could also set timers for the lights to turn themselves off after a certain amount of time. Then, you won’t accidentally leave your friend’s light on all day if they aren’t home to turn it off on their own after they’ve finished enjoying your message.

3. Red Alert

Alarms are designed to scare off intruders. You can take it up to the next level with your smart lights. In movies, when there’s an emergency, a spaceship or base will often go to red alert. The alarms and flashing red lights are a nice visual effect for cinematic purposes. In the real world, that’s bound to scare more than a few people. By programming your smart lights to flash red when the alarm goes off, you can create your own personal red alert and send intruders running.

What other unique uses for smart lights have you found? Let us know in the comments.

Cat owners love making their fur babies happy. They give them toys, scratching posts, beds, the best boxes that come in the mail, and whatever else they deem prudent for giving their cat a good home. In the rapid advancement of technology, people have found ways of using smart devices to keep cats safe, entertained, and well taken care of. Some devices have been designed with the owner in mind. Now, owning a pet is easier than ever. Here are three smart devices for cats you will love.

1. GPS Tracker

Perhaps you have a cat that you can’t trust outside. He’d eat something he’s not supposed to or get stuck climbing a neighbor’s tree. But he’s a little escape artist, so he sometimes slips past your decision that he’s an indoor-only cat. On one of such days, you’ve been looking for him more than an hour, but he’s nowhere to be found. Maybe you have a cat that’s allowed outside. It’s time for her to come inside for the night, but she isn’t responding to your calls or promise of a treat.

Whatever the case, if you’ve ever not been able to find your cat, you know how nerve-wracking it can be. The first of our smart devices for cats will make it so you’ll always know where your cat is. Attach a GPS tracker to your cat’s collar, and finding your pet is a simple task of tracking it from your phone. Some trackers come with additional health and fitness monitoring features. If you want something basic that doesn’t require a subscription, plenty of options are available.

2. Self-Cleaning Litter Box

One of the main advantages of cats over other pets is that they can be litter box trained. Then, you just have to clean a litter box instead of checking your entire yard or cleaning an entire cage. The disadvantage is that you have to clean a litter box.

With a self-cleaning litter box, you can simplify this chore. After your cat does its business, the box will scoop itself, and you just need to empty the waste drawer. Some smart litter boxes will detect when your cat enters and leaves. Then, it will wait a set amount of time to ensure the cat is gone before scooping. This way, it doesn’t frighten your scaredy-cat into not wanting to use the litter box that makes intimidating noises.

3. Smart Feeder

Everyone who has cats knows they like being fed at a consistent schedule. And the cat picks the schedule. Should you fail to comply, you will be subject to incessant meowing until you correct the error of your ways.

There are days you won’t be around to give your cat dinner on time, though. Sometimes, circumstances arise that make it so you don’t get home until late, and you feel bad that you’ve kept your kitty waiting so long. With a smart feeder, you can avoid this. All you need to do is pour food in the feeder’s storage tank and schedule when to dispense food and what portion size, and it does the rest. Want to go out to dinner after the matinee or afternoon game? Go for it. Your cat isn’t waiting for you to get home before it can eat.

Maybe your cat eats all the food that is supposed to last from morning to dinner too fast, which makes it sick. To prevent this, you can program your smart feeder to dispense more meals with smaller portion sizes throughout the day. If you’re really lucky, your cat will learn you don’t need to be around for it to get breakfast, so it will stop meowing at you at insane o’clock in the morning.

If you have multiple cats, get a selective cat feeder. When a cat walks up to the bowl, the feeder will know which of your cats it is via a collar tag. It will dispense the appropriate amount for that cat. Should you have a cat on a special diet, you can use multiple selective feeders. Put the diet food in a feeder that will only respond to the special diet cat, and put regular food in a feeder that will only respond to the other cats.

Princess Anna was onto something when she said, “The sky’s awake, so I’m awake.” Due to circadian rhythms, the inverse is also true. When the sky is asleep, people generally want to be asleep. Because of this, even if you’re a morning person, it can be difficult getting up in the morning during winter when the dark is glaring in through your windows.
Sunrise alarm clocks were developed as a means of combating this. A set duration before your scheduled alarm, the clock’s light will turn on at its dimmest setting. It will gradually brighten in an artificial sunrise that eases you out of sleep. When your alarm goes off, you’ll wake up to a lit room.

The only downside is the cost. Cheaper options are available, but these don’t have a smooth sunrise cycle. They will often be one hue rather than mimicking the multiple hues of a natural sunrise. Plus, instead of gradually fading to brightness, they will become brighter in incremental jumps. There are also complaints about the cheaper sunrise alarm clocks not lighting up a room as thoroughly as some of the other options. For a good sunrise alarm clock, you would be looking at $100+. You can make a DIY sunrise alarm clock using smart lights as a less expensive alternative.

Choosing Your Smart Lights

Smart lights can connect to your phone, smart hub, or smart speaker. You can remotely control them from an app or voice commands. You can also schedule times to automatically turn them on and off.
When you create your DIY sunrise alarm clock using smart lights, you will want to get at least one light, which you can put in a lamp. However, for the best experience, you will want to put smart lights in your bedroom’s overhead light fixture. If the light fixture has a dimmer switch, you will want to convert it to a regular switch before using smart lights. Otherwise, the light will flicker and make a buzzing noise.

For a lamp, you may run into problems if you try using a touch-activated lamp, but if you use a lamp with multiple brightness settings, you can turn it on to the highest setting after installing your smart light, and you should be fine.

Smart lights come with a broad range of features and capabilities. For your DIY sunrise alarm clock, you will at least want to find a light with a fade-in feature that you can schedule to fade to full brightness over an extended duration. To optimize your sunrise alarm clock more fully, get color-changing lights. Ideally, you will find bulbs capable of fading through a color cycle that you set while simultaneously becoming brighter.

If you want to connect your smart lights to your smart home hub or smart speaker, you will want to check for compatibility as you research different bulbs. Keep in mind that the device you use to connect to your smart lights will need to be connected to Bluetooth or the internet for your DIY sunrise alarm clock to work as scheduled. If you generally turn your phone on airplane mode at night, you will want to start using do not disturb instead. However, unlike many regular sunrise alarm clocks, a power outage won’t throw off your programming.

Programming Your Artificial Sunrise

Most sunrise alarm clocks have a 30-minute cycle. You can copy this or choose a different duration as you create your DIY version. For purposes of this article, we’ll use the 30-minute model, and you can adjust as needed for what you decide is best for you. There are two main methods you can choose between when creating your sunrise.

Sunrise Simulation

The most accurate way of simulating the sunrise involves using the light tones in a natural sunrise. This is the method the top-ranked sunrise alarm clocks use. They start with a red-toned light at the lamp’s dimmest setting. As the light progressively gets brighter, the light fades through shades of orange and then yellow. By the time it reaches its brightest setting, the light takes on the hue of natural daylight.

To recreate this with your DIY sunrise alarm clock:

1. Familiarize yourself with your smart light app.

The exact process will vary based on the brand of light you selected, but this guide will walk you through the general idea.

2. First Schedule

Create a new schedule starting 30 minutes before your alarm will go off with a light that fades from red to orange over ten minutes and increases from 0% to 33% brightness.

3. Second Schedule

Create a second schedule starting twenty minutes before your alarm with a light that fades from orange to yellow over ten minutes and increases from 33% to 66% brightness.

4. Third Schedule

Create a third schedule starting ten minutes before your alarm with a light that fades from yellow to daylight over ten minutes and increases from 66% to 100% brightness.

5. Set to Repeat

Set the schedule to repeat on the days you want it to.

If your bulb isn’t able to fade between colors, you can manually create a fading effect. Start with the color set to red. Then, create a new schedule with a shade of red closer to orange and so forth as you work your way through the sunrise cycle. The more schedules you program, the more natural your sunrise will feel. You will want ten minutes of red and shades that get closer to orange. Then, have ten minutes of orange and shades that get closer to yellow. Next, have ten minutes of yellow that get closer to daylight. Finally, set your lights for daylight when your alarm goes off.

These may sound like intensive processes, but most smart light apps are easy to use, and once you create your sunrise schedule, you never have to do it again. If it’s still more work than you want to do, there is an alternative. You won’t get the natural shades of sunrise, but it’s easier to set up.

A Simplified Sunrise

For a simplified sunrise, pick one light color or a white tone. Then, set it to fade from 0% to 100% over 30 minutes, reaching the brightest setting when your alarm goes off. Do you have a Google Nest? There is a built-in feature where you can say, “Hey Google, turn on Gentle Wakeup.” It will automatically set your smart lights to fade to full brightness over the 30 minutes before your scheduled alarm.

Whichever method you decide to go with, you no longer have to wake up to darkness in the winter. With your DYI sunrise alarm clock using smart lights, you can always wake up to sunrise for easier, brighter mornings.