Sowilo Bifröst RGBWW LED Strip (CRI95+ with adjustable CCT !AND! tint)

maukka · 2019-08-22T07:28:40.000Z

So I came across this Canadian company making a adjustable very high CRI LED strip with 2200K and 6500K white LEDs plus an RGB LED. The RGB makes it possible to adjust the tint (i.e. duv value) of the light so when the warm and cool whites are mixed, you can still adjust the tint near the black body line. Although most of us prefer the nice rosy tint (negative duv), this is very handy for matching the light with ambient conditions.

At the moment they don’t have their own controller to do the adjustment, but for now you can use the Philips Hue Ledstrip Plus driver and their smartphone app. It has slow PWM and isn’t super accurate and takes some effort to get what you want, but as a concept I’m loving it. Sowilo said they’re hoping to come out with their own hardware later this year.

In a way, the Sowilo Bifröst is pretty much a plug’n’play upgrade to the lower CRI Philips HUE LED strip which also features a similar RGBWW configuration.

I’ll have a more comprehensive review done later, but here’s some photos.

Six cables, 24V is common, plus 5 grounds for all the different emitters

Warm white is super pleasing.

The cool white is above the BBL, but no worries, it can be brought down by adding some red and/or blue.

When mixed, the tint is as rosy as a 219b.

And just for kicks, the glorious CRI of an RGB white light.

maukka · 2020-04-12T13:03:07.000Z

I connected the Sowilo Bifröst to a Philips Hue LightStrips+ controller. The controller itself is not very nice with visible PWM and the software is a bit tricky when trying to finely adjust tint, but it works.

The strip was just soldered on the controller.

This is the color space the LED strip covers

With the help of a colorimeter/spectrometer the HUE app presets can be saved so that the selected mode tracks the BBL pretty nicely. The adjustment itself is very finicky.

Here I adjust the tint from the app all the way from very rosy to very green.

Couple of examples for CRI at the tint adjusted modes.

jon_slider · 2020-04-12T14:22:43.000Z

maukka:

outstanding info!
too sad about the PWM from Phillips Hue. I stopped using their lights because of that.

SKV89 · 2020-04-12T19:21:05.000Z

Very good light quality and adjustability. Too bad the leds are spaced so far apart. Not bright enough for some use cases. If it was 28w/m, I would change out some of my current ones with these.

iamlucky13 · 2020-04-13T04:24:18.000Z

That’s a fascinating product idea. It could be fun to outfit a room with this kind of lighting and be able to set the lighting to such a wide color space.

I assume tuning the RGB emitters affects the CRI. Phosphor converted E17A’s should perform better at that, but I could see not providing quite as large of a color space to work in.

michaelb · 2020-04-14T10:50:48.000Z

I’m trying to understand a couple of things here (I’m not an expert at all).

What makes this ledstrip so special? If I understand correctly it has high CRI for WW and CW. Does it also have a high CRI for the RGB led?

Is there something additionally tuneable with this ledstrip that makes it work better with the Philips HUE controller/app? Or is this just a great ledstrip that by being great itself naturally also works great with the Philips HUE controller/app. In other words would it also work great with any other zigbee controller (or eco system)?

What software/hardware generates these test output images above?

arek98 · 2020-04-14T22:59:17.000Z

SKV89:

Very good light quality and adjustability. Too bad the leds are spaced so far apart. Not bright enough for some use cases. If it was 28w/m, I would change out some of my current ones with these.

Looks like your wish was granted
https://sowilodesign.com/collections/led-strips/products/bifrost-147-pro-led-strip

sac02 · 2020-05-05T13:00:20.000Z

Great stuff, maukka!

djozz · 2020-05-05T13:34:04.000Z

stuff