Nanoleaf Shapes & Essentials Lightstrip Review – Expensive and Buggy
These Nanoleaf panels have really become a staple of the streamer setup, and have also made their way into a load of homes as stylish, even semi-functional, lighting and looking at them you can see why. Having individually controlled panels that build to interesting shapes is a great look, but my god they are expensive. Does the end result justify that cost? Let’s take a look.
I’ve actually got two Nanoleaf products here, I have their Essentials Lightstrip starter kit, and their Shapes Triangle 9 piece kit as well which is the one I want to start with. This is the more iconic option, although isn’t the same as their original “Light Panels” kits now called Rhythm Light Panels. In the starter kit you’ll find 9 triangle panels, 10 total adhesive pads, the controller and a small pad for that, 10 solid bridge connectors to link each panel together and a 42W power supply. Each panel draws 1.5W, but when you factor in the controller the maximum number of panels supported power wise is 28W, although you can buy a 75W PSU from them instead and it’s worth noting the controller can address up to 500 panels.
The mounting method leaves a little to be desired, specially this bit of skin that’s now missing from my finger. The process is relatively simple but not one I’m the most happy with. Basically, you stick their adhesive pads to the free-spinning disc on the back with a portion of the pad deliberately not stuck to the panel. That’s so if you want to remove them you can pull on that tab flush with the wall to ‘safely’ remove the adhesive rather than rip your wall apart. You then place the panel where you want and use your fist to apply firm pressure in a circular motion – which is why I’m missing a bit of my hand. Unfortunately their mounting solution doesn’t allow for any motion or adjustment after being stuck (only rotation which especially if you’ve stuck any other panels already isn’t useful) and they only include one spare pad so if you get it wrong you’ll be spending another £10 for a pack of replacement pads from them.
Once they are mounted though, damn are they pretty. While at low brightness levels it’s easy to see they use three LEDs on each corner of the triangle diffused across the panel, once it’s at higher brightness levels it’s a pretty even output. Each panel is individually addressable, which means you can have rather nice patterns flow smoothly across them, or set each panel to a fixed colour, or even have it act as a music visualiser with the microphone built into the controller.
You can adjust the brightness both from the controller, and their app, although the steps on the controller are fairly large so you may find you’ll want to use the app to fine-tune the brightness to how you want. It’s worth noting it does have auto-brightness control which should mean it varies the brightness based on the light level in the room, although I can’t say I had that happen for me.
Of course, streaming is one of the big things they are commonly used for, especially since they have a pretty impressive light output when put together. Each triangle panel is rated for 80 lumens of light output, which with 9 panels comes to about the same as a 10W LED light bulb, although that doesn’t hold a candle to Elgato’s light panels like the ring light you can undoubtedly see in my glasses that can go up to 2500 lumens.
Still, despite the reasonable light output, for my streaming setup which tends to be an otherwise dark scene save for me being lit, I have to turn the brightness down to pretty much it’s lowest level to get it to not be blown out. That’s a shame, as at that lower level they seem to flicker slightly. It’s not the worst, but it’s something I noticed while testing them out on my first stream with them.
Before I get into the app, it’s worth talking about the other product, the Essentials Lightstrip. This is a much more basic product, I suppose as the name suggests, as it’s a somewhat standard strip of LEDs with fairly basic controls by default. I say ‘somewhat’ standard, because it isn’t just a strip of 5050 LEDs, it’s an RGBWW, or technically RGBCCWW strip meaning a red, green and blue LED plus two cool white and two warm white LEDs for a total of 5 in a cluster. Adding warm and cool white LEDs isn’t overly new, in fact you can get LEDs themselves that have all that built in rather than separated, but the difference is the doubling of the white ones. That means the maximum brightness this strip supports is 2,200 lumens, but the catch is that’s only with the white LEDs turned on. When only using the RGB LED for direct colours it’s considerably dimmer – in fact a basic lux meter app reading reports it as a full power of 10 less light output.
The controller on it’s own is pretty basic. You have clicky and tactile buttons for power, mode, brightness up and brightness down, DC in on the bottom and the JST 1.27mm pitch 6 pin connector for the adapter to the 2.54mm pitch connector on the RGB strip. It looks to be the standard common cathode pinout with what I’d assume is 12V in, then individual ground pins for red, green, blue, cool white and warm white. That does mean this isn’t an addressable strip, so you can’t have differing colours throughout the strip they’ll all be the same colour.
The controller communicates with their app via bluetooth, which means unlike the shapes doesn’t connect to WiFi and means it doesn’t natively support schedules (which is a big problem for how I’ve got it setup as a bedroom/night light) and requires you to be close to them (like in the same room close) to change any settings. But, as you might have noticed on the box, Nanoleaf says these support Google Assistant but if they don’t connect to WiFi how is that meant to work? Well, that’s where the other logo on the box comes in, “Thread”.
Thread is a low power protocol that uses IPv6 and the 802.15.4 wireless protocol (which when bundled together is called 6LoWPAN) to create low power mesh networks for internet-of-things devices like this. When connected to a thread border router, these strips have a fair bit more functionality like schedules (through Google Assistant). The trouble is, thread border routers aren’t exactly commonplace yet. Apple’s HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K are pretty much the only common products that can act as one, although devices from Google and Amazon do technically have the hardware to do it but aren’t enabled yet. If you’ve got one of those routers the value proposition of these strips change pretty drastically, but since many don’t you are left with a somewhat underwhelming usage experience.
And that brings us nicely onto the app. For both the Shapes panels and the Essentials Lightstrip – although much more so for the latter – the app is quite possibly the worst, most infuriating companion app I’ve ever used. It outright crashed almost every time I tried to use it, I had to force-close it countless times, it refused to connect to the lights constantly, the firmware update process on the light strip took closing on an hour thanks to it starting the update then crashing over and over and over again, and any amount of controlling the lights I guess overloaded the connection because if you try to make any level of fine detail adjustments it refuses and gives you a popup message to say the lights aren’t responding – which is the only error message it ever shows.
There are incredibly stupid bugs, like scrolling through the default list of preinstalled scenes makes them shake violently and their layout assistant tool which is meant to let you lay out your panels in their app then use augmented reality to show you what that design would look like on your wall was a painstaking process where it’d refuse to let you move certain panels and the AR component seems to be missing rendering it somewhat pointless.
On top of the bugs, the app is painfully unintuitive. Want to rename your device? Cool go to devices then.. Er.. tap on it? Nope. Swipe down? Nope… Long press? Ahh there we go, unintelligible icon buttons that were hidden under an invisible box – a box that when it’s in it’s actions position completely hides the name of the device you are configuring despite having plenty of space to display the name and the actions. Those icons by the way are rename, identify and remove. Ok what about changing what scene it’s on? Well that’s on the Dashboard tab where you probably just tap on the box and.. Oh, no that turns them on. Ok long press? No, swipe? Nope. Wait, I’ve got it! The logo for the shapes is the power button but the rest of the box is the edit button. Right… Don’t get me started on creating scenes which seem to be the same thing as ‘Palettes’ meaning you have to save everything twice and the ordeal it is to work out that the “paint” mode SOMETIMES requires you to ‘paint’ the colours on but other times it’ll work with a tap.
Luckily at least the shapes panels do work with their OpenAPI, so as long as you know their IP address you can install all the scenes you want with their terrible app then just send basic put requests to change scenes, set brightness or even run your own custom schedules from something like a raspberry pi, especially since their API has worked pretty flawlessly for me with instant action rather than their truly dreadful app which was slow and unresponsive. If you are interested in seeing a video on how to use their API feel free to let me know in the comments below.
So, should you buy either of these? Well, for their MSRP of £180 for this Shapes kit, you’d have to really want them and get them set up once then never touch them again. That’s a large chunk of change to drop on a decorative light fixture, and I can’t say I’d be willing to myself. They are cool, and the whole point of the “Shapes” design is you can mix and match between these triangles, the hexagons and mini triangles to build a wide range of designs so you can make them fit to your space. You might get nickel and dimed having to buy their “flexible linkers” to make them bend around corners and you do need a smooth wall so no raw brick or ‘popcorn’ wallpaper.
As for the light strip, unless you have a thread border router it’s gonna be a hard pass from me. While it is cool to have such a bright strip when using the cool and warm white LEDs, the brightness difference between that and the RGB modes is painfully obvious, connecting to them with their app is almost impossible and the lack of native scheduling means they aren’t really any different from the much cheaper RGBWW strips you can buy on Amazon that offer longer lengths – this £45 kit only comes with 2 meters whereas a £20 kit on Amazon runs more like 5 meters. With a thread router I think that’d be considerably different, especially as they intend on supporting these through their API meaning you can again run your own manual schedules and controls without having to potentially even be in your house.
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TechteamGB Score
