Aqara’s new device Zigbee supports Matter and HomeKit adaptive lighting. The device or light strip rather supports both Matter and Apple Home via compatible hubs, not just together and it also includes Adaptive lighting, but however not through matter.
Aqara’s New Device
Aqara has just released a new Zigbee RGB smart light strip known as the LED Strip T1. It reportedly costs $49.99, requires an Aqara hub, and it is also compatible with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and even IFTTT. The device in question when paired with certain hubs, which is including the Aqara Hub M2, the light strip as you should know is also compatible with the Matter smart home protocol.
The T1 here is one of the very few light strips that support the Adaptive Lighting feature of Apple, and the only one that gets to support both Adaptive Lighting and Matter. It however does not support Adaptive Lighting through Matter, unfortunately; nothing actually does. Still, it is kind of nice to see new, Matter-compliant lighting come to market making use of the solid Zigbee standard. (Whatever happened to that Hue-to-Matter bridge, I kind of wonder?)
Specs and Features
The 6.6ft (2m)-long light strip’s Adaptive Lighting support simply means that you can set it to tune its colors throughout the day automatically to be warmer or cooler but all depending on the time. The only other light strips in the market that support the circadian lighting feature of Apple at the moment come from Hue and Eve (which is also the old Nanoleaf Essentials strip, which of course, doesn’t Matter).
As I have already stated though, connecting the Aqara Strip T1 to Apple Home by making use of the Matter protocol instead of the old-fashioned way simply means that you will get to lose Adaptive Lighting, since the still-nascent “universal” smart home standard does not support it at the moment.
The nice thing here is that, unlike the Matter Essentials strip of Nanoleaf which as you should know only supports Apple Home via Matter and thus does not have support for Adaptive Lighting at all — Aqara’s Apple HomeKit certification simply means that you don’t have to give that up.
What It Means For the T1 to Be an RGBIC Strip
The T1 in question is an RGBIC strip, thus meaning that it can effectively show multiple colors simultaneously (as opposed to the older-style light strips that can only show just one color at a time). Also, Aqara has stated that each of its ten segments is addressable, meaning that you can control them individually when changing colors, although that does not apply to the tunable white light portion of the LEDs, which gets to apply to the entire strip at once.
You Can Set Up Custom Effects within the Aqara App
Finally, just like other colorful smart bulbs and light strips from companies such as Govee, you can also set up custom effects within the Aqara app if it is that you want to show off fun snaking gradients or even flashing colors and it can even sync to music making use of a built-in microphone.
Price and Availability
The trimmable, IP44-rated Aqara T1 LED Strip reportedly costs $49.99, and a 1-meter extension kit on the other hand costs $14.99. Just so you know it is available at Amazon in the US, Canada, as well as several European countries and at other retailers that are listed on its “where to buy” page.
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