Lights! Music! Song! .... Having fun with Nanoleaf Canvas in the bathroom!

 Recently I saw a big drop in price for Nanoleaf Canvas on Amazon and I've been kind of interested in their products for a while, so I thought why not? Let's give it a whirl.

I bought the starter kit and, initially just laid it out flat on a table and played with it. I was so impressed I took it around to a good friend's house. They are part of my social bubble, and we often eat outside in their back garden. We had the lights laid out again, and set them up to react to the music playing in the back ground... so impressed that I then went and bought the 25 tile expansion pack and started building a display in the Family Bathroom.

At the core of the Canvas system is the control tile. This is the tile that controls everything that you wish to do physically. This is also the tile that the Nanoleaf app connects to. 

As you can see, the instructions are well laid out. I found the written version to detract from the look. Fortunately, Nanoleaf have just stuck that on there so you can peel it off to give a cleaner look.

The control tile can control up to 500 tiles. At about US$20 a tile, that's  would be a lot of money! 

Whilst that sounds amazing, you do have to understand that the supplied PSU is only 24W and that the maximum number of supported panels is 25 per PSU... so you'll need to add more PSU's... and they are not tiny little things! 

Fortunately there is a 75W PSU available as an option, but it is not plug in. It is designed to be hidden in the wall. There are some specific instructions from Nanoleaf on how to go above 25 tiles. I'd heavily suggest reading them, even for a 25 tile display.

Now, whilst the control tile is the centre of the whole set up, it can actually be placed anywhere in the configuration and the power cable can be connected to any tile, giving you a great deal of flexibility in your choices for layout and design.

The control tile also has the HomeKit code on the back which can be set up via NFC with later iPhones.

The Nanoleaf tiles are all connect via the supplied Rigid Linker, however there are also flex linkers as an optional extra. Those Flex linkers will enable you to go around a corner, for example.

Important: Nanoleaf have a newer range of tiles called Shapes. They are hexagons and two sizes of triangles. Canvas and Shapes do not interoperate.

Design

Nanoleaf have really thought about making this as easy an experience as possible. They even have a design wizard inside their app.

You input the number of tiles at the top, and then move them around to get the design you want. It even shows you where to put the Linkers.

Now, I must admit, I am obviously quite a fan of technology and this is one of the first use cases I've seen for AR. If you look at the graphic, on the bottom row you can see an eye. This takes you into AR mode, and enables you to see your design on the wall!

Tip: The double sided-sticky pads are very strong, so lay it out before you stick it to the wall.

Tip 2: When you lay it out flat, it looks much larger than it will look on the wall.

There are various effects you can get with Nanoleaf Canvas. My favourite is to react to Music, but more of that later.

Integration with HomeKit

The integration is pretty good. You do not have to use the Nanoleaf app if you don't want to, but then there are a whole bunch of capabilities that you wont get, including firmware updates. If you do want to use their appp, you can choose to sync, or not, with their cloud.

I actually did it both ways, just to see the difference. Without is a completely standard "Add Accessory". Here, I'm showing with the app.

By adding it through the app a whole bunch of scenes showed up in the room in which I installed the Nanoleaf. I took a look at the scenes and I can't see anything special about them, so there must be some magic going on in the background to control the Canvas.

You will also notice that there is an opportunity to define orientation. By default, that is defined by the orientation of the control panel. I also think it is pretty smart on how it actually know the configuration you have created.

You may be wondering why that is important. That's a good question. There is a whole section in the app simply called "... More". It's where you will find the settings and one of those settings is the ability to turn on/off the scenes mentioned before, but there are others including, but not limited to:

• Creating swipe gestures, instead of using the buttons on the control tile
• Enabling an individual tile to become a programmable Homekit button

So cool! Now your Canvas enables you to control things by touch!

Automation

I have a fairly sick sense of humour at times, and this presented me with an opportunity to have some fun.

I have set up a few automations for the Family Bathroom, and one is to turn on the wall and play some music when someone walks in. Then when you walk out, it turns off teh Nanoleaf Canvas and Pauses the HomePod mini I have in there.

The turning on Nanoleaf Sound Bar scene and playing music is triggered by the ceiling light coming on because it enables me to disable it if I wish. I also only have it running from 9am to 10:30pm.

Final Thoughts.

I really like these. I must admit, I first though of them as being a bit gimmicky, but there are certain circumstances where I think they've be great. I deliberately chose the bathrooms s I can see them adding mood lighting to teh bathroom.... imagine a nice bath after a hard day, the HomePod mini playing something smoothing, and the Canvas giving off a gentle glow. I could also see them being used for outside at a party, or in a home movie theatre/games room. Not so sure about my bedroom.

Missing functionality.

It's a great shame that Canvas does not interoperate with Shapes. I'm sure that has been raised before.

For me, the biggest shame is that these panels have Ambient Lighting, and it isn't exposed to HomeKit. Now Nanoleaf have just launched that for their Essentials range, so may be it is coming. Who knows. 'd like to see it though.