Osram/Lightify
About the vendor and its products
Osram is a brand name (but which after being taken over by Ledvance has been changed to Sylvania in some markets) for lighting products and also includes smart versions, under the heading of Smart+, with a product range in continuous development. The smart products distribute across these categories:
Smart lighting for indoor use, spanning light bulbs (with sockets E27, E14, GU10, and even GU5.3, which none, or at least very few, competitors offer), light strips, smart plug, motion sensor, and a couple of versions of switches
Smart lighting for outdoor use, including light strips, garden poles and spots, wall lamps, and a smart plug (also here, very few alternatives exist)
Base station, called Lightify Gateway, which forms the heart of an Osram system and is required to connect the components mentioned above (notice that it should be possible to use (at least some of) the products without the gateway if you have a Philips Hue bridge or a Homey)
Osram has a Lightify app that goes with the Lightify system.
As far as I can tell, the products either use Zigbee or WiFi as communication protocol. Many of them are also compatible with both Amazon Alexa og Apple Home.
Our experiences
Notice that on phones, the table might only display in landscape mode
| Component | Room | Experiences |
|---|---|---|
Gardenspots Mini RGB |
Uninstalled |
We started out with just the spots and attempted connecting this to both SmartThings and Homey, but could not turn them off. An Osram base station was therefore also purchased, which did make it possible to update the firmware of the spots, but both with and without the base station, the experiences were mixed. It often happened that they were unavailable and to turn them off, I had to program them so that at sunrise, they were first dimmed down to about 30% intensity. A few minutes later, they were turned completely off, as for some reason it was impossible to simply turn them off from 100% intensity. We therefore uninstalled the Osram base station and had the spots connected to Homey and integrated into Apple Home via HomeKitty. But also this solution was unstable so they were eventually taken out of use. |