Cree Lighting

My biggest gripe is for a specific situation. I have several light fixtures that have multiple bulbs. You can group the bulbs together so that you can control the entire fixture at one time. That’s great and works well. There are 2 issues. First, there is no way to have the groups be the default on the app. You have to open the app, then click on the group icon at the bottom of the screen. Then pick the group you want to control. Sounds like a a small thing but it’s a pain if that’s how you control your lights. You should be able to set group as the default for every time you open the app. Second, when you hit the group icon and then select the group you want to control it always takes several tries before the group you want to control opens. It always opens another group you didn’t select first, and if you aren’t paying attention you will be controlling the wrong light. So fix those two issue and I will be very happy.

Brightness 1200 lumens and color temperature is good. I added 16 bulbs. I found the Cree Lighting application not very intuitive. Touch selection items are too close together. Constantly bringing up the wrong selection. Best to add one bulb at a time. Add too many and the timeout to initialize configuration stops and installation fails. Groups are primitive in that all bulbs in a “Scenes” use the same color and dim all together. Not like Philips Hue, where bulb(s) in Scenes have their own color and brightness settings within a group. Other problem is if bulbs are turned on individually you cannot turn on or off if they are in a group. The bulbs individually all must be off before you use them in a group. Integration with Alexa works perfectly. Automation works well setting up following the sun in color temperature, is very cool feature. Wake and bed times is what you would expect. Sunrise and sunset are my favorite with the changes throughout the seasons. I mentioned color temperature and dimming are really great but using the bulbs for color is not very bright, colors are not diffused well and looks like 3 LEDs are active for any selected color. You would expect that all leds in the bulb would be visibly active producing a smooth vibrant color. The Cree Connected Max are not smooth and diffused like Philips Hue. There is a huge difference in price ($150 for 2). I will add that Cree Connected Max delivers a lot of value for the price. I hope the Cree Lighting application matures and delivers a better experience to the smart home.

The Cree Max bulbs are great. Good color, inexpensive. The app is clearly an afterthought. I don’t think the developers have ever actually used it. 1) Can’t edit routines (e.g. sun track) without the bulbs responding. This means the lights are going crazy if you’re editing at night. 2) The lights change if you go through different menus (e.g. dimmer -> routines -> scenes). Annoying. Somewhat related to #1. 3) Each time you click on dimmer menu, it switches over to color mode. Even if your bulbs are in white mode. If the mode must change when clicking through the menu, the new menu should assume the bulb’s current state. 4) Grouped bulbs should have an option to stagger the color changes. For example, fireplace mode would be more effective if bulbs rotated through the colors independently. This doesn’t apply to all scenes, but having the option would be nice. 5) The ‘sun track’ mode should run even in the background even if the bulbs are off. If I turn off bright white at noon, they should start at warm light when I turn them on at 5pm. 6) Add an option for power-on behavior. Cree doesn’t have a good solution for integrating with a physical smart switch, so these get turned off occasionally. I would like to select what happens when power returns.