Smart lights, finally

I have been obsessed with LED strips since I was about fourteen. Not smart ones, just the cheap coloured strips you stick around your room and plug into the wall. There was something about the ability to change the entire feeling of a space with light and colour that I found genuinely compelling, long before I had the vocabulary to explain why. The right colour temperature in a room is the difference between a space that feels alive and one that just has overhead lighting in it. I understood that instinctively as a teenager and I have never stopped believing it.

Ten years and a few houses later, the strips were still going in every room I lived in. But they were dumb. Fixed colour, fixed brightness, on or off. I decided it was time to make them smart.

The obvious route is Philips Hue, which is excellent and also costs roughly as much as a small holiday if you want to do an entire flat properly. I did not want to do it that way. Instead I spent an evening on AliExpress, ordered smart LED strips, smart bulbs, and a couple of controllers, and waited the customary two to four weeks for them to arrive from somewhere in Guangdong province.

The setup took longer than it would have with a premium system, and the app is not as polished. I do not care about either of those things, because the end result is exactly the same: every light in my flat, controllable by voice, for a fraction of the cost.

The LED strips went behind the TV, along shelves, behind the headboard. The smart bulbs replaced every overhead light. Everything is grouped by room, everything talks to Siri, and now the whole flat responds when I ask it to.

That specific moment, lying in bed, not wanting to move, saying "Hey Siri, turn off the lights" and watching the room go dark without lifting a finger, is one of those small pleasures that does not get old. It is objectively trivial technology. Lights have had switches for a hundred years. But there is something about your home responding to your voice that feels, every single time, slightly absurd and completely brilliant.

I have wanted coloured lights in my room since I was a kid. I just did not know then that one day I would be able to control them from bed, for twenty quid, sourced direct from a factory in Shenzhen.

Either that is the future, or it is just a very convenient way to be lazy. Probably both.