New! Yeelight Filament Bulb and Bluetooth Mesh Hub

It would seem that not a day goes by without some news from either Yeelight, Aqara or Mijia at this point, and when it comes to their products and HomeKit, it’s always a welcome thing. Just today Aqara’s forthcoming Smart Smoke Detector was added to the Mi Home app, which we can only assume will be HomeKit compatible at launch or shortly thereafter. This has now been followed by the previously reported Yeelight Bluetooth Mesh Gateway also surfacing in the app.

Yeelight announced this hub back in June, which is designed to work with their Bluetooth mesh bulbs, that would in effect create a mesh network for Bluetooth devices, in much the same way that Zigbee works by creating a network that spreads the signal as you add more devices. That’s at least the simplistic way of looking at it. It’s also worth noting that Bluetooth and Bluetooth mesh are different entities, insomuch as a regular Bluetooth device can’t become part of the mesh network.

The hub is designed to work with the company’s E26/E27 bulbs, as well as candelabra bulbs and downlight fittings. It should also work with the company’s own rotary dimmer switch that the company issued at the start of the year. Although the screenshots above don’t mention HomeKit, the company’s own presentation in June did explicitly mention the hub would be HomeKit compatible, however, the aforementioned Rotary dimmer switch wouldn’t be a device that works with HomeKit, at least in terms of rotary dimming functionality, as this isn’t currently supported by the HomeKit framework.

Alongside the addition of the hub to the Mi Home app, Yeelight have also officially announced their new LED Filament bulbs. These use wifi as their method of connection, much like many previous Yeelight products, and is also compatible with HomeKit. As with many of the other Filament bulbs that have either been released or announced in the last few months, the Yeelight filament bulbs can only reproduce warm white, so no colour or cool white options.

The bulb is 6w and has a maximum of 700lm, and is capable of 5-100% brightness levels, is set to 2700K on the white temperature spectrum, and is suitable for all countries, as it works with 100-240v at 50/60Hz.