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What’s a new year with­out a gar­land?! But since we have a smart home, then the gar­land should be smart. In this review, there will be a smart gar­land that can be con­trolled using automa­tion and a mobile appli­ca­tion via WiFi. In addi­tion, TUYA led gar­land can be con­trolled using the remote con­trol, which is includ­ed in the kit, as well as from the block direct­ly on the gar­land. The main dif­fer­ence between this gar­land and sim­ple ones is 7 dif­fer­ent instal­la­tion modes, rang­ing from a Christ­mas tree, end­ing with a fence or even a Christ­mas wreath. All modes have built-in work pre­sets, cre­at­ing a very beau­ti­ful visu­al­iza­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, you can sim­ply turn on the desired col­or and bright­ness on a smart gar­land using the Tuya Smart or Smart Life mobile appli­ca­tion. Also, the TUYA smart LED gar­land can act as light music, for this a micro­phone is built into the unit, and sev­er­al modes of oper­a­tion options. Smart gar­land Tuya has 16 basic col­ors and 16 mil­lion shades — when com­pared with the usu­al mul­ti-col­ored gar­land, it is much more beau­ti­ful. In addi­tion, you can set a sim­ple automa­tion of the smart WiFi gar­land, when the sun has set — turn it on, and turn it off auto­mat­i­cal­ly after mid­night. I also tried to inte­grate the Tuya smart gar­land into the Home Assis­tant smart home sys­tem.

It comes in such a box, in fact, only with the inscrip­tion Globe Fairy Lights. On the back there is a stick­er with the main char­ac­ter­is­tics, name­ly the MSL6 mod­el, pow­ered by USB 5 Volts. Length 32.8 feet, or 975 cen­time­ters, rough­ly round­ed — 10 meters.

Inside the box we have instruc­tions for use. You will have to read it, because how to add it to the smart home sys­tem is not entire­ly clear. The instruc­tion shows and explains all this, there is no Russ­ian, but in Eng­lish every­thing is gen­er­al­ly clear.

Fur­ther in the kit is a meter pow­er cord from any USB port with a volt­age of 5 volts.

Imme­di­ate­ly next to it is dou­ble-sided tape for attach­ing the gar­land block to a smooth sur­face.

And a small IR remote con­trol. It is pow­ered by a CR2025 bat­tery — before use, we take out the ship­ping film.

The gar­land itself con­sists of a con­trol unit and one and a half cen­time­ter plas­tic balls with address­able LEDs. The num­ber of LEDs depends on the length of the tape, there are 5 meters, and there are 10. 33 and 66, respec­tive­ly. But, as for me, the price of $ 4 at the time of the cre­ation of the review, for an over­pay­ment of a 10 meter gar­land, it’s worth it.

The balls with LEDs are tight­ly sol­dered, and to the touch they rather resem­ble the so-called soft touch. Three-core cable in a soft pro­tec­tive braid.

I real­ly liked how the gar­land is made in terms of balls, they dif­fuse the col­or very nice­ly and glow almost even­ly.

Balls are locat­ed every 15 cen­time­ters. In total, there are 66 balls on a 10 meter gar­land. From the con­trol unit to the first ball of the gar­land 1 meter.

The gar­land can be locat­ed on the street, it is not afraid of mois­ture, but this applies only to the gar­land, and not to the con­trol unit — it just needs to be pro­tect­ed from mois­ture in the form of snow, rain or con­den­sa­tion.

The gar­land con­trol unit has an input for con­nect­ing pow­er and a sep­a­rate remote IR receiv­er to work with the remote con­trol from the kit. In addi­tion, there are three phys­i­cal but­tons for con­trol­ling the gar­land on the case itself. The block can be fixed both with dou­ble-sided tape from the kit, and on a thread / screw / car­na­tion, for this a small eye­let is locat­ed in the upper part.

But­ton “Music» — con­trol of var­i­ous modes of music, using the micro­phone built into the con­trol unit. A short press puts the gar­land into the light-music mode, a long press cycles through four musi­cal sce­nar­ios. After chang­ing the sce­nario, the gar­land will flash cheer­ful­ly in red, blue, pink or green.

But­ton col­or — when pressed once, it switch­es the gar­land to the pro­grammed glow cycles, there are 8 of them in total, the switch­ing is cyclic.

But­ton “On/Off” — turn the gar­land on or off. Long press — put the gar­land into pair­ing mode with a mobile appli­ca­tion.

Inside the block is a small board with a WiFi mod­ule.

If nec­es­sary, we can also pow­er the gar­land from Power­Bank — con­sump­tion is up to 0.8 amperes with a bright warm col­or.

By the way, there is no light­ing draw­down between the first and last LED, which means that the wires are good.

IR control box

Let’s start a more detailed acquain­tance with this smart gar­land from the IR remote con­trol. The remote con­trol is divid­ed into 11 con­trol zones, which are described in detail in the instruc­tions.

Top row but­tons + and - are respon­si­ble for adding or decreas­ing the bright­ness of the gar­land, and if the music mode is turned on, then, respec­tive­ly, increas­ing or decreas­ing the sen­si­tiv­i­ty. The on/off but­ton is clear here, the pre­vi­ous sta­tus of the gar­land is remem­bered. But­ton W — , quick­ly switch the glow mode of the gar­land to warm or cold white light.

But­tons on the sec­ond row RGB — which quick­ly switch col­or to red, green and blue, respec­tive­ly.

The third row of but­tons with the inscrip­tion 1H,4H and 8H this is the auto­mat­ic switch­ing on or off of the gar­land after a cer­tain time. If the gar­land was turned on, and press the 4H but­ton, then, respec­tive­ly, after 4 hours, the gar­land will turn off. And if it is now turned off from the con­trol pan­el or con­trol unit, and press 8H, then it will turn on.

Below them, in the 4th row, there are 3 but­tons for select­ing var­i­ous music mode. And as you can see, they dif­fer in the degree of work of the gar­land. I real­ly liked the 3rd mode of oper­a­tion. To the right of these blocks are but­tons for select­ing the bright­ness of the glow 25%, 50% and com­plete bright­ness.

But­tons Mode 1–5 this is a choice of five pre­set modes of oper­a­tion of the gar­land, I think every­one will find their own mode to taste =). But­ton with two arrows starts a cycle of 20 gar­land modes, the glow mode will auto­mat­i­cal­ly change every 30 sec­onds. The up/down arrow but­tons allow you to select exact­ly the mode of oper­a­tion, count the flash­es of the lamps among the pro­grammed 20 and leave it. If you switch the gar­land to the con­stant glow mode, then use these but­tons to select the col­or we need. 16 col­ors avail­able.

Tuya Smart mobile application

Well, the most inter­est­ing thing is work­ing with the Tuya Smart or Smart Life mobile appli­ca­tion. We put the gar­land into pair­ing mode, for this, when the gar­land is turned off with the pow­er but­ton, hold down the pow­er but­ton for 5 sec­onds. After we release the but­ton, the gar­land will start flash­ing red — it means it has switched to pair­ing mode.

Turn on Blue­tooth on your mobile phone and con­nect to your home WiFi net­work in the 2.4 GHz band. We open the Tuya Smart or Smart Life appli­ca­tion and I was imme­di­ate­ly prompt­ed to add a new found device. If this does not hap­pen, we add it as a reg­u­lar WiFi device, choos­ing an out­let with WiFi. Spec­i­fy the pass­word for our WiFi net­work and wait for the process to com­plete.

In the main win­dow of the pro­gram, we can only turn our gar­land on or off. Imme­di­ate­ly we see the sta­tus of the timer, if we set it.

Going inside the plu­g­in, the gar­land imme­di­ate­ly offered to update the firmware. I would nev­er have thought that I would update the firmware in the New Year’s gar­land =). In the main win­dow of the pro­gram, we see 7 dif­fer­ent options — where we will attach our gar­land. The 8th box promis­es us that the list will be expand­ed.

In the set­tings, we can view infor­ma­tion about the device, imme­di­ate­ly view the scripts and automa­tion asso­ci­at­ed with this device. Give access to the device to anoth­er per­son. But the most use­ful thing is to cre­ate groups of devices, espe­cial­ly if you have more than 1 gar­land, so that they work and are con­trolled syn­chro­nous­ly.

At the bot­tom of the but­ton is the on/off switch of the gar­land. And then the tran­si­tion to var­i­ous modes of oper­a­tion of the gar­land, sce­nar­ios, music and a con­stant glow.

The last but­ton is the set­tings but­ton, where you can set dif­fer­ent sched­ules for turn­ing on or off the gar­land. It is con­ve­nient if you decide to turn the gar­land on and off at cer­tain times and days of the week. But I think it would be more log­i­cal to do it by automat­ing sun­rise / sun­set.

There is also a count­down timer, it will sim­ply change the sta­tus of the device from off to on and vice ver­sa. In this case, the count­down of sec­onds until the timer expires will start on the main screen of the appli­ca­tion.

Smart Scenes

A lit­tle strange, but the first scene to con­trol we see a palm tree, not a Christ­mas tree. Ok palm tree, so palm tree, let’s move into it, in fact it is a wind­ing of a gar­land around a pole. The slid­er at the top of the pese­ta allows you to adjust the bright­ness of the gar­land glow — this con­trol is avail­able in all work sce­nar­ios. There are 4 dif­fer­ent pre­sets for how the gar­land works in the “Palm”.

If you switch to the Christ­mas tree mode, there are already 9 ready-made pre­sets for the gar­land to work in the “Christ­mas tree”.

The gar­land can also be hung onfence“or rail­ing, in this sce­nario there are 4 work pre­sets.

Anoth­er option is a gar­land of sev­er­al lay­ers. In this mode, 8 ready-made pre­sets are avail­able.

In mode chaot­ic place­ment of turns of the gar­land — 8 ready-made work pre­sets are avail­able.

Well, what to do with the gar­land when the new year is over?! Cor­rect­ly, you can hang it behind the TV and make both light music and just a beau­ti­ful glow in the back­ground. To do this, you need to place a 10-meter gar­land to the ball to the ball and fas­ten it very close with tape or oth­er. I’m not going to do that yet, I’ll show you how it is. In the mode “TV set» — 6 ready-made work pre­sets are avail­able.

The last glow mode is “Christ­mas wreath” on the door of the house. There are 4 ready-made work pre­sets avail­able.

Let’s go to Music modewhen the gar­land flash­es in time with the music. In the upper part, the main 4 col­ors that will be active in the work can be set both by hand by click­ing on the col­or cir­cle and select­ing the one you need on the cir­cu­lar palette. You can also enable auto­mat­ic mode. At the bot­tom there are 4 icons for select­ing var­i­ous music modes and a slid­er for adjust­ing the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the built-in micro­phone. You can also adjust the bright­ness.

In dim­mer mode — we can sim­ply select the col­or we need by click­ing on 4 pop­u­lar col­ors at the top of the appli­ca­tion, or select our own by sim­ply tap­ping on the cir­cu­lar palette with our fin­ger. Bright­ness is con­trolled by the slid­er at the top of the screen.

Automation

I think it would be more cor­rect to turn on the gar­land at sun­set, or a lit­tle lat­er. To do this, in the main menu of the TUYA or Smart Life pro­gram, we switch to automa­tion mode, select add, and when weath­er con­di­tions change. Where we choose sun­rise / sun­set and it already has sun­set.

Click next and select our smart gar­land to launch. In total, 3 points are avail­able for automa­tion. Turn off turn on, select the oper­at­ing mode (sce­nario, col­or or light music mode. At the same time, it is not pos­si­ble to addi­tion­al­ly spec­i­fy which sce­nario or col­or we want. So, you can set the timer to turn off by select­ing the desired time in sec­onds.

There­fore, for com­pe­tent work of automa­tion, I rec­om­mend that you first select the mode of oper­a­tion we need through the plu­g­in and the pre­set for it, and then sim­ply set the on / off through automa­tion. There was such an automa­tion. The sec­ond item can be set to turn off the gar­land either at sun­rise or at a cer­tain time.

Working in Home Assistant

It is for­ward­ed to the home assis­tant through the Local Tuya inte­gra­tion. So we added it, imme­di­ate­ly found a gar­land on the native plat­form. And accord­ing­ly we add it to lovelace. Our gar­land has appeared on the main screen.

In fact, the gar­land is trans­mit­ted as an RGB LED lamp. We can cre­ate automa­tion, we can con­trol the bright­ness and col­ors. turn the device on or off. And see the sta­tis­tics of work

Video review

You can buy at AliEx­press — Deliv­ery took 18 days.

Also, please do not for­get about the Telegram chan­nel @Lubopswhere you will find not only dis­counts, pro­mo­tion­al coupons, but also var­i­ous nov­el­ties from the smart, and not so smart home sys­tem.

findings

I def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend buy­ing. The price in com­par­i­son with the pos­si­bil­i­ties is very low, sim­i­lar gar­lands but from famous brands are sev­er­al times more expen­sive. There is only 1 minus so far, and even then it is not sig­nif­i­cant — you can­not draw your own pre­sets or modes. There are quite a few modes, and every­one will be able to steal the Christ­mas tree in their own way. You can even change the pre­set on the Christ­mas tree every day and make it unique for each day. Also, the Chi­nese do not for­get about updates, and they will prob­a­bly sup­ple­ment both var­i­ous modes and ready-made work pre­sets. And when the new year is over, you can make a dec­o­ra­tion for the TV or even make beau­ti­ful col­or music at home with­out any prob­lems.