A few more updates on my Philips Xiaomi EyeCare Smart Lamp.
- I’d bought two 12V 1A power supplies from two different vendors. The cheaper one failed. While the lamp did power up, the controls became inoperative and I couldn’t control the lamp. The second one worked like a charm and is superior to the original power supply — solid casing, thinner profile, and thicker wiring. All functions worked as normal and no indications of any tolerances being pushed.
- The Mi Home app (Mijia) was a bust on Android. However, on iOS I made some progress. With my 5th gen Apple iPod Touch, I was able to load the Mi Home app and it found the Philips lamp WiFi signal. The lamp’s flashing amber LED changed to a solid blue, so it took the WiFi network info and was able to add itself to my defined 2.4G network. But… and this is the unfortunate sour turn… the Mi Home app timed out in the connection process with the lamp. So despite it being on the network, I could not control the lamp with the app. It’s not a huge deal. I would probably not use the app much at all, in actuality. But it would’ve been nice to try out some things like the timer control.
- UPDATE: I was able to make a little more progress on Android. I have an older HTC One M8 running Marshmallow Android. I was able to get the Mi Home app installed and it found the lamp. It was able to successfully pass WiFi info to the lamp and it responded. However, the final task was for the Mi Home app to bind to the lamp by showing it as an added device. It failed to do that. I did see a message to “bring lamp closer to router”, but despite doing that, just 10 feet away, I had the same problem. I confirmed the lamp has the correct info, by changing the WiFi name. As soon as I did that, the status LED on the lamp started flashing blue. Then, once I changed the WiFi name back, the LED stopped flashing and remained solid blue (with no network info, it would flash amber). So, the lamp is on the WiFi network. My hope is that a future version of the Mi Home app will possibly address this issue. I’ve notified Xiaomi.
Overall, the lamp is really nice. My only remaining gripe is that the emitter tint is neutral white with a hint of green. There’s no CCT adjustment (i.e. no alternate bank of emitters grouped by CCT). I did try out a minus green filter that is just an 8th in strength. It removes the slight green cast with not much of a perceived drop in output. So I’m going to get a larger sheet of this filter, cut a piece to match the capsule shaped primary lens, and use an adhesive to adhere it. There wasn’t any other alternative, because I couldn’t figure out how to open up the head and I’d rather not take a chance in breaking it. I suspect the black plastic end piece may come off, but I’m uncertain and don’t want to damage it. If that could be removed, then it would be super simple to just slide a filter inside it with no adhesive required.