Yeelight Star Pro LED Table Lamp (YLCT03YL) - quick review

Cupertino, February 5, 2020

I received this lamp last week (via eBay) and below are my observations from a few days of use

First of all, this is not a "Desk" lamp as some reviews call it. It is a table or, more correctly, a bedside lamp. Its stem is too short to work comfortably like a desk lamp. I only realized it after I received it

TL; DR I like the lamp and I don't regret buying it, but there are problems

- The built quality is excellent
- The quality of the light is excellent
- The start time after power reset is very fast
- The firmware is a buggy
- Convenient wireless charger, but weak and not fully compatible with AirPods
- Physical control is strange

HomeKit implementation issues:
- After I connected the lamp to HomeKit, it responded very slowly and after a while it stopped responding. A power cycle solved that HomeKit controls are good and were instantaneous after restart
- I saw an "unanswered" answer twice on the first day, but twice, I think, the lamp went off between the router and a mesh point at that time. Refreshed after a minute or so
- I had a really "bad" one when the lamp was still running on its own application, but it was completely dead in HomeKit. It was normally displayed in the mDNS browser, so it should have been visible to HomeKit. I had to feed it twice to get it back
- Although, in general, the response in HomeKit is almost real-time, in some situations, I saw that the lamp reports the previous state of HomeKit: e.g. I lit the lamp with the help of its physical button, but in the Home application, it was still displayed until I reopened the application to make it refresh the states. Activating scenes would sometimes set the brightness that was set before the current state. This does not happen often, but it can make some automations unreliable I think
- The lamp has essentially two scales of brightness: normal and moon (night). In normal mode it can go very bright and weakly reasonable. In Moon mode it is very-very low. The problem here is that only the normal, complete mode is exposed to HomeKit. It is not possible to understand from Home applications whether the lamp is in Moon mode or not. The brightness control is 1-100% in both modes, but the color temperature only applies to the normal mode. If the lamp is in Moon mode and you reach color timer, the Moon mode is canceled and the lamp may skip to full brightness suddenly (the difference between 100% in Moon mode and 100% in normal mode is like day and night)

Wireless Charger (Pro only):
- The wireless charger is rated for 10W in accordance with its certification (https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/products/8086), but is only recognized as 6W by iPhone XS and delivers only 3-4W at charging. We checked these values ​​in the CoconutBattery application. For comparison, USB port charging 5W and 10W chargers provide 8W at the same battery level. This makes charging the phones very slow. Maybe other phones will charge faster, I can't say
- AirPods Pro charging: Unfortunately this is one of the chargers that do not work with AirPods. This has to be something that Apple did in Apple mode itself, which AirPods doesn't load with many Qi-certified chargers and models. The problem is that charging starts, but after 10 minutes or so it will stop and the status LED will start blinking indicating a "foreign object" warning. Removing the AirPods and placing it in the charger recharged the charger one day (for another 10 minutes), but the other day, the charger locked in intermittent mode until power was restored. Interestingly, I tried to load only the case (while using AirPods) and successfully went from 65% to 100% without "blinking".

Physical and food control:
- You can control the brightness and temperature of the color with the physical light of the lamp, but the logic is incompressible - press and hold moves the brightness, the color temperature down, the second press and hold the directions in reverse. I find it almost impossible to get the desired combination using the button. That means sitting at my desk right next to the lamp, I should get my phone to set the desired light
- The lamp came with a universal power adapter of 12 V (100-240V 50-60Hz) with American prongs

I would actually buy a second lamp, despite all the problems listed above, but they seem to increase in price after I ordered the first one

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