Twinkly Strings + Music Bundle App-Controlled 400 LED RGB+W Multicolor Christmas Lights 105-Feet Indoor/Outdoor Smart Lighting with USB Music Syncing Device

This product is well made and worth the money if the company invests on improving the app. The app which this product is dependent on is weak. It’s lack luster and limiting. The ability to create your own personal tree designs would be nice. You are limited to the ones the company designs and while a neat thing to show off once and awhile they aren’t mind blowing or anything you would want a tree to do for very long. While you can edit speed and light intensity and color that’s where the creativity ends. Any other offerings of this product are already available by other light companies for way below the cost. Most importantly there was not one update to the app this entire season I have owned these which tells me the company’s interest in improvement of the overall product isn’t important.

you get what you pay. handling these lights you can tell they are not your cheapo drug store strands they sell. these are more like the lights they use on trees at Disney Parks.***read descriptions thoroughly. the lights don’t connect end to end, they need to be strategically placed. my 400 count had one cord that separated off into 2 separate bundles of 200.

love it

TLDR Summary:I Bought two sets of 400 LED RGB-W Gen II Twinkly Strings & the Twinkly Music Dongle – for ~$400 this is a massive disappointment of vastly too many setup problems, buggy software, design failure with features that simply aren’t designed to work the way you would want or expect. The hardware could work, if they can fix the software, but as of December 2020 this is a waste of money and a huge frustration, save yourself the hassle. I’ve wasted more than two months on this.String Length:The 400 LED RGB-W Gen II strings aren’t the 105ft long that you might expect, given the product information on Twinkly’s website, but rather two 52.5ft long strings from the controller. This may affect your install.Outdoor usage:Twinkly’s website shows many examples of lights on trees and outside. But then the manual says it’s not waterproof, so I reached out to Twinkly to find out; apparently it’s IP44 certified (rain-proof), but not IP67 or IP68 which are submergible. For outside in the rain so long as it’s not lying in a pool of water it should thus be OK. I guess I’ll see how long they last.Light Mapping Challenges:I spent hours installing the lights, climbing on a ladder and zip-tying the lights to the ceiling of my gazebo. The next step was the 3D mapping to teach the Twinkly application where the lights are so that it can programmatically display patterns on the lights. You have to hold your phone still for 10-15 seconds while it takes a long exposure of the lights; you need to repeat this several times so that it sees each light at least three times from different orientations. However, if your layout is too large and you can’t get far enough away for your camera phone to see the whole layout, which I couldn’t even when lying on my back on the floor of the gazebo, then you have to take many pictures to combine them all together. I took 30-35 pictures the first time I tried to get all the lights to go green (the setup color indicating that the light has been seen from several directions). Then it spends several minutes rendering the 3D model in the cloud. At this final stage you wait and hope it’ll work.Unfortunately the rendered pattern is often useless and doesn’t look anything like the nearly 2D flat matrix of lights on the ceiling of my gazebo. After several attempts I did get a model that I could at least recognize was the lights on my gazebo ceiling. But then I realized my mistake of using the camera phone in landscape orientation, but the app runs in portrait orientation, and there’s no rotation function on the mapping, so the whole pattern was annoyingly rotated 90 degrees on the screen. Incredibly the Twinkly app lacks this basic functionality to rotate the rendered model!I reached out to Twinkly to ask about the lack of rotation, and a lack of warping as I needed to stretch the pattern to make it more accurate. I was told these features were supported in iOS, so I started again, now using an iPad. Alas, the camera on the iPad was worse than my Samsung S8 phone, and the results were entirely hopeless, I also never actually saw any additional features in iOS either – so much for rotation & warping.Finally I did achieve a good mapping by using a Samsung S20 phone which has an ultra-wide angle lens built in, so it could see more of the lights in one shot, it still took several shots, but did a vastly better job of mapping, and by holding the phone in portrait the whole time it didn’t have a rotation problem with the final result. If you can see your whole set of lights with the camera of your phone in one shot you’ll likely be fine, otherwise, prepare for several attempts to get it right.Google Assistant Sync e.g. “Hey Google” control:The Twinkly app is frankly pretty basic and incomplete and shouldn’t be considered much more than a setup tool, it’s not really ideal for normal usage. For that, Twinkly have integrated their lights as a Google and Alexa “Skill” that becomes integrated into Google Assistant. If you’ve named your lights appropriately you can then refer to them in “Hey Google” commands. There’s not a lot of guidance as to this, so originally I called my group of 2x400 lights “Pair800” but later realized it would be much better calling them “Gazebo” so renamed them as such. Once you’ve then synced the Twinkly App with your Google Home app, you can use the Google Voice Assistant to verbalized commands such as “Turn Gazebo On” “Change Gazebo to Teal” “Change Gazebo Brightness to 20%” once you have it setup, and if you chose a sensible name for your lights, this works really well.Nice Surprise Benefit – if don’t use your primary Google account for your Twinkly setupGiven all the hassle related to my 3D mapping challenges I was very pleased to find that if you’ve created your Twinkly Account using an email other than your primary Google account (I used a different email address), then you can install the Twinkly app on multiple devices, owned by different users, and using your Twinkly account as the ID each of the different apps and users can control the lights from their phones too. This way I was able to set up the control from my daughter’s android phone, her iPad, and my phone too. I was lucky to have created the account using something other than my Google account for the Twinkly account, otherwise I’m not sure I would have had this option. This also renders the benefit that whatever device is able to capture the best 3D model automatically shares the light mapping model with all other devices connected to the same account. The downside is that there’s only space for one 3D mapping model, so anyone could accidentally screw things up for all users of the account by starting the mapping again and there’s no mapping “lock”. Also, if you have a “good” but not “great” mapping, you have to decide whether to try again, knowing that you’re throwing away the “good” mapping before you can see whether you can improve it.Music Sync – the biggest disappointment and deception of allThis is where I think Twinkly really fails and thoroughly lets you down. Inside the Gallery of the Twinkly app there are a set of effects, including many that you can download for free. Some of them have a music sync option, so that you can preview them with your smartphone, using your phone’s mic to sync the audio it hears to the movement of the lighting effect. This is advertised all over Twinkly’s website. What they don’t tell you is that you need to keep the smartphone active for this to work, so if you switch to a different app, or if you get a text popup, or if your screen times out and goes to sleep the audio sync just stops working. Even if you’ve got a spare phone to dedicate to this purpose and can leave it switched on the whole time, the latency is pretty bad, I measured 250ms delay between the audio and the lights, so it doesn’t really feel in sync at all – it’s like watching a movie when the audio and picture doesn’t sync and it looks very weird.I reached out to their technical support and they told me to buy the Twinkly Music Dongle, this is a USB powered network based microphone, the USB is just for power, so you can plug it into any USB power source that is close enough to hear the music. However, what feels like a huge deception is this Music Dongle doesn’t work with any of the effects and patterns available in the Gallery. It only works with its own limited set of patterns that you can’t edit, customize or control.Even worse, you might have thought that you could use the Carousel feature to load your favorite Effects into the Twinkly system and play them throughout a party, changing effect every few minutes with each effect synced to the music, as this is obviously how it should work. Unfortunately, the Carousel feature only works with the Gallery Effects, and neither the smartphone mic nor the Twinkly Music dongle work with the Carousel. So the end result is that you’re forced to choose between 1) either the Carousel to automatically rotate through a set of effects – but entirely without any kind of audio sync, or 2) to abandon using the Carousel to automatically switch between effects, and to enable audio sync you’re stuck with one effect, and manually switching between that one effect and another yourself.

I got two strings of Twinkly lights, both of which failed on me in less than two years. The app was cumbersome, took forever to map lights, and then couldn’t do simple things like update WiFi connections. Worse than that their customer service is awful for troubleshooting and replacements. Terrible app, terrible products, terrible company.