And where you clip the Nanoleaf Canvas panels together, the panels in the LIFX Tile have to be joined with wires. This is both very good and very bad.
It’s good because the wires make for a much more flexible setup. The tiles don’t need to be aligned with each other to join together, so you have vastly more ways to configure them. Indeed, they don’t even need to be touching, so you can spread them out over a much greater area, if you like.
It’s bad because the wires are an absolute pain to get right, especially if you do want the panels touching each other. Each wire is way too long to merely join two panels together without it poking out. But to get the wires to the right length you have to wind them though a tricky series of channels before you go to stick the panels on the wall, and then hope to god they don’t pop out before you’re done.
At the back of each Tile are slots for wrapping wire through in convoluted designs until they’re the right length.
On the plus side, making things more difficult than they used to be is the core principal of Happy Home Maintenance, and designing and mounting your very own LIFX Tile setup is guaranteed to give you hours of joy.
Physically setting them up is only a fraction of the fun, of course. You then have to attach them to your Wi-Fi network (perfect!) so you can control them from the LIFX app on your phone, which lets you turn them on or off, and select their colours or brightness.
The app often lets you design the colour scheme on your display.
If you’re planning to use the Tiles only as a source of illumination – say, as a big lighting panel mounted above a kitchen bench, that’s all you need to do with the app. It’s not at all a bad use for the LIFX Tile, by the way. It’s much brighter than the Nanoleaf Canvas, so it makes a better light source. But it’s worth noting that each panel is much thicker than a Nanoleaf tile (33.5 mm versus 11 mm, counting the adhesive) so the Canvas may be a better choice if you’re planning to recess the light.
Of course, there are cheaper and easier ways to create a large, flat light panel so, unless you’re a true devotee of Happy Home Maintenance, you really want to do more with the LIFX Tile.
You can paint patterns on the app screen with your finger, for instance, and they’ll appear on the panels moments later. It’s not as granular as we had hoped (each LED is too diffused to let you write your name across the panels, for instance) and it’s not always entirely accurate. But with enough practice and artistic talent you could probably create some nice designs.
Easier to use, perhaps with some applied effects, are the very nice themes that come with the app, such as “Love”, “Mellow”, “Exciting” or “Warming”. If you choose the “Morph” effect and then apply the “Soothing” theme, it will cause pastel pinks, oranges and blues to swirl slowly across your tiles, kind of like an old-fashioned lava lamp only up on your wall.
But of course it’s nothing like an old-fashioned anything, we soon found. The app kept unexpectedly jumping out of the settings section while we were halfway through a new design or even before we’d started one – leaving us stuck with the old Tile colours and patterns until the app decided to settle down long enough to let us control things again.
And once you add voice control, you’re in for a whole new level of fun (by which I mean “unreliability”). Google Assistant, in particular, was very fun. We could often turn the panels on or off simply by saying, “Hey Google, turn on the Tile.” (Because, really, who wants to pull out a phone and fire up an app just to turn on the lights?) But almost as often Google would inform us, “It looks like the Tile isn’t available right now.”
Is that Google’s fault? Is it a problem with the LIFX Tile? Is it the Wi-Fi? Is it the NBN? Any one of those could cause the lights to stop working, making it almost impossible to diagnose and fix.
But that’s not to say it’s not worth trying to fix. Happy Home Maintenance!
LIFX Tile
Likes Bright, deep colours in endless variety
Dislikes App doesn’t always work. Voice works even less
Price $400 for pack of five
