Teardown: Casper’s Clever Little Nightlight
I bought one, as I sell a product with a similar use case [0].<p>My impressions: The overall concept is great. The UX is cool, but some of the UX choices are strange to me. For example, automatically dimming down when you turn the light on (you have to press the button to pause it) vs. the other way around. It works well as a wake-up light, although I would have preferred something higher-blue for the morning.<p>There's really nothing "low-blue" about this light compared to other 2700K LED lights, other than the fact that it has a dimmer built in. The 2700K diodes they chose don't have better color quality than normal LED bulbs. It has "amber" (somewhere around 2000-2200K) LEDs at the very bottom end of the range that have great color quality, but they are too dim for anything but navigating to the bathroom at night.<p>They are modulating the LEDs with PWM at a very high frequency, almost 8 kHz. That's better than most of today's smart lighting by far. There's still debate about 100% flicker actually being healthy, even at higher frequencies.<p>For the lighting nerds, I captured photometric and flicker measurements, which you can review at [1].<p>Overall, I think Casper's lamp is a good effort. I hope future versions can improve the color quality, some of the interactions, and the overall healthiness of the light compared to regular lighting.<p>[0] Bedtime Bulb: <a href="https://bedtimebulb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bedtimebulb.com/</a><p>[1] Casper Glow Photometrics: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/u8n0way6xqwbqcd/Casper%20Glow%20Photometry.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/u8n0way6xqwbqcd/Casper%20Glow%20Ph...</a>