Twinkly Squares, your customizable LED panel and for HomeKit

Twinkly launched Squares, some light panels different from all the othersbecause we don’t only have colored lights, we can also display images, GIFs and soon we will have widgets.

With the number of LED lights on the market, it seems difficult for them to surprise us, but Twinkly has done so by offering a product that we haven’t seen until now: Twinkly Squares. These are LED panels that can be used like classic light panels, you can create color animations that change at will, or we can even show portraits, artwork or our favorite GIFs, all with a very retro “16-bit” style that gives a truly spectacular effect. In this article we analyze your starter kit, consisting of 6 LED panels and everything necessary for its assembly and operation.

starter kit

Twinkly offers different packs that can be purchased. The normal thing is to start with the 5+1 starter kit, this is exactly what we are analyzing in this article. We can also buy other extension kits (1, 3 and 3+1) to obtain a larger canvas and which we can gradually expand until we get what we want. East starter kit includes:

• 1 main panel and 5 additional panels
• Connections to fix the panels together, double and single
• Connection cables for panels
• USB-C to USB-C cable
• USB-C charger
• Template to be fixed to the wall
• instruction manual

The LED panels are made up of 64 (8×8) LEDs with 16 million colors each. The master panel is the one that controls the whole set, and you can add up to 15 panels in total others that can be purchased separately. You should think of each LED as a pixel, so the more panels you add, the higher resolution you can achieve in your images and animations.

The composition you can create with these panels is up to you, although if you want to use them to place images, it’s okay to create a 2×3 panel canvas. Assembly is very simple thanks to all the accessories included. To place it on a wall it will be necessary to use a drill and screws, because the assembly is too heavy to use another adhesive system. In my case, two screws were more than enough to hold the assembly together.

Setting

Once everything is assembled, it’s time to use the Twinkly app (link) to work its magic and recognize the design we made. Whether it is a rectangular or linear design, straight or slanted, thanks to the application and the camera of our iPhone it will be recognized and the designs and animations that we create will adapt perfectly to the ” canvas” that we have created. Images and animations should fit the design we created. If we want to use these panels as a “frame” we must opt ​​for square or rectangular designs, if we want to use them as light panels with colors and animations we can opt for linear and staggered designs … It is important to know that they can be combined with other Twinkly products so that the colors and animations blend perfectly with each other.

The configuration process is very simple and the application tells us in a simple way the steps to follow to add it to our WiFi network. From the application itself we can manage all the Twinkly accessories, combine them and choose all the designs that we want to display there. It’s a fairly intuitive application, translated into Spanish and without tabbed navigation, without cumbersome menus, so it’s easy to get the most out of it to achieve spectacular effects.

We have many different designs, some common with the rest of Twinkñy products, with changing colors, animations, etc. and other designs made specifically for this product, such as “artworks” that we may mirror in a pixelated way on our panel. In addition to all the designs that appear in the app, we can download other designs from the app itself, and it’s important to note that Twinkly is constantly adding new ones. As if that were not enough, we can also create our own designs, we can draw with our finger on the screen of our iPhone, and we can add photos even GIFs that we download from the Internet. In the video, I show you how we can add them to the Twinkly app, and the end result is a real hit. Of course, as I said at the beginning, the more panels you add, the better the end result will be. For the painting of Marilyn for example, it is better to have at least 9 panels for an optimal result. Even so, the 6 panels in the kit can do wonders.

HomeKit

The integration with HomeKit is almost anecdotal, since you can hardly do anything with these panels in the Home application. Turn on, off, set solid colors and adjust brightness – pretty much nothing of interest. Yes for me It’s important to be able to include the panels in my automations so that when the house lights go out, the Twinkly panel also goes out. Apple should give their Home app a spin and how inconvenient it is with lighted panels, hopefully it can be better integrated with these devices soon. To add these Twinkly Squares to HomeKit we must follow the usual procedure, scanning the code that is on the main panel, or the one that we have in the instruction manual, in case you have already hung them on the wall.

Coming Soon… Widgets

In addition to how spectacular GIFs look in this Twinkly Squares or how we can pixel art to create our own canvases in the living room at home, one of the most interesting features is yet to come: widgets. Although we don’t have an official release date, it looks like they will be available in the Twinkly app in early 2023, and we can use these panels as informative widgets to let us know about the weather, create timers , etc.

Editor’s review

Twinkly offers us something completely new in light panels with its Squares product, going much further than a simple decorative panel, offering unimaginable expansion and design possibilities, and all this combined with an application that we already knew but that we did not know. amaze us with how well it works and how easily it does things. Despite the fact that its integration with HomeKit is almost anecdotal, these panels are the dream of many come true. His price? Well, as you can imagine, they don’t come cheap: the 5+1 starter kit we analyzed in this article costs 224.99$ on Amazon (link). You are still in time to include it in the letter to the Magi.

Versus

• Very limited HomeKit integration