For a long time, I’ve been interested in the idea of Twinkly Christmas lights. These are smartphone-controlled lights that you map on your tree in three dimensions, which means that you can then choose exactly which part of the tree should light up, and you can create some really cool effects using those lights.

Now, this is not a sponsored video. Twinkly haven’t given me anything for free, but I am making this to show you the setup process from getting a new box of Twinkly lights to then controlling them from your smartphone. And if you want to buy something yourself, there’s a link in the description that will help my channel out.

Okay, let’s get started. So, in this video I’ve gone for the Twinkly Candy Series, and I’ve got a set of 100 star lights, which look like this. In fact, that’s not a great demo really. Let’s put them on the tree. Hang on… there we go.

Now, I’ve kind of gone as a spiral around the tree, and I had some left over so I’ve gone up and down once as well. This is not a great way of putting the lights on. My wife would have done a far better job than I have, but it’s a good test of the Twinkly app to see how it detects where they are.

Speaking of which, let’s open up the Twinkly app now, and it’s going to immediately search for local devices on your Wi-Fi network. As this is a brand-new set of lights, they’re not yet on the Wi-Fi network, so it hasn’t found them. But that’s okay because we can add them manually, and we can choose the type of system we’ve got and then follow the instructions on screen.

For my one, I need to long press the button on the cable until the light goes a bluey-green colour. And now, just like that, it’s found it. I can then connect the lights on the app, and they’re going to flash and show you that that connection’s happened on the tree as well.

The next step is to then add these lights to your Wi-Fi network if you want to, which will make controlling them easier in the future. I’ll put my password in and then it will join. And even though these are really cool and fancy Christmas lights, we’re still not immune to that thing that every new device has – a firmware update.

It takes about 2 minutes for my lights, and we’ll let that finish through the magic of editing. Now, okay, now I can name the lights. I’m going to call them Stars. And now we get on to the more fun part – the bit I was curious about – how we can map these using our phone.

To do this, we need to enable camera permissions. So I’ll turn that on now. And you can see there are four different ways we can connect these lights through the camera. I’ll do the basic setup first. That’s the one where you just take one photo.

And what I’m going to do is make sure that my phone can see the entire tree. I’ve got a little tripod for this video, but you don’t have to. You can hold it still in your hand. Then I’m going to press Capture at the bottom, just like taking a normal photo in the camera app.

What’s interesting here is when you take that image, it’s going to take about 2 or 3 seconds to capture, and the lights are going to start changing patterns and colours while that’s happening. This is so Twinkly can work out which light is which on the string and it can then map it digitally.

When it’s done, it will take a moment to process, and then you should see the lights appear like this on your screen. You can actually see straight away that the tree is lighting up in correspondence with the pattern on the screen, which means the mapping has worked really quite well.

To be honest, I could probably leave it like this, but for the sake of a thorough test, let’s go back in time a second and we’ll map them using the more advanced scan as well. So this time we’re going to take multiple pictures. Same sort of process as before, but from different angles of your lights.

I’ll do the first one just like before on the tripod, and again, it’s going to take 2 or 3 seconds, and the lights are going to flash while that’s happening. Then it’s going to give us this screen. So let’s talk about that for a moment.

On here we can see two coloured grids. One of them has got green, orange and red, and the other is mostly green. These grids represent what you can see on your tree. If your tree is green, that means it’s scanned and it knows where all the lights are. But if your tree is red or orange, or has patches of red or orange, that means you might want to add another photo.

So you can angle your camera to make sure you’re capturing the part of the tree you haven’t already captured. Then you can take another picture just like this. Each of these steps will build up a richer picture of where your lights are, and for me, I did three or four and then the tree went green.

When that happens, you can then proceed to the next part because you know that it’s captured all the lights as you want them to. Then just like before, we get the tree lighting up from top to bottom and we get that same diagram as we had last time.

I would actually argue that for me, I had the same sort of result doing the basic one-photo scan and this more advanced multiple-angle scan. So for me, the basic one would have worked just as well.

And you might have noticed on both scans there are two lights that are slightly off the tree. One at the bottom and one in the bottom right-hand corner. I’ve put these down to reflections of things in the environment – a pin badge and the desk underneath – which has kind of tricked Twinkly a little bit.

It doesn’t affect how they work on the tree, but it might be worth doing your scans in a non-reflective environment or a plain wall, and perhaps moving the tree again afterwards.

That being said, I’m happy with what I’ve got, and I can then press Save and Apply. At this stage, we can scan more lights and add more if you need to, but I’m just going to press Start Using the App. And look, as quickly as that, we’ve got the gallery of all of the different effects.

And if I tap onto Rainbow, the tree immediately turns into that lovely rainbow effect. And you can see on the phone and in real life just how cool those lights look.

Now, that rainbow effect does look really cool. It’s certainly visually impressive. But there are loads more effects in the effects library as well. So let’s jump on a couple more while I’m talking.

This one’s particularly nice – the Firework – it kind of has a sparkly effect as well as the lights changing. But actually, every time I test an effect then come off it, it goes back to the default setting I had before. None of the effects I’ve chosen are actually applied until I press the Apply button at the bottom.

So here on the Rainbow Rain option, I quite like how it looks, and let’s now send that to the lights. So I’ll press Apply at the bottom. And now whenever the lights power on or when I leave the app, it’s going to go back to this setting instead.

But there’s actually more things we can do as well as just picking settings from the effects library. So let’s have a little look at what else our Twinkly lights are capable of.

And don’t forget, if you’ve watched this far, hopefully that means you’re enjoying it and you’ve found it useful. If that’s the case, please do check out my YouTube channel, and make sure you subscribe. And if you want some Twinkly lights as well, that link in the description helps my channel through a little bit of affiliate revenue. Again, not a sponsored post, but hey – it helps me and the channel grow.

Okay, let’s have a look at the Special Effects Wizard. This is a really fun feature I found in the Twinkly app where you can customise exactly what your lights are going to do.

At the very top of the screen, we have this magic wand button, and when we tap on that it opens the effects wizard. We’ve got a few different starting points, and I’m going to choose the type of movement – the type of animation – that I want to begin with. I’m going to tap on the Gradient option here.

Then at the bottom, you can see a few different colour palettes. I can tap onto any of these and see it in real time on the tree and on the diagram on my phone. But what’s more exciting is we can customise exactly what colours we want in that gradient.

So I’ll tap on the Add Colour button. And now I can add or adjust any of the colours here. I’m going to go through each one and make them a more yellowy-green colour so my tree then pulsates and fades in different shades of green.

And as easily as that, we’ve completely customised the effect to give whatever colours we wanted. At this point, I could tap Save, but actually I’m going to change it again by tapping onto Pattern. And then I can choose a completely different pattern for my lights to work in.

I like this one with the red stripes going across it, but I wish the stripes were blue rather than red. But that’s okay, because once it’s loaded, we can then tap on the colour editor again, tap on the red and choose whatever colour you want instead. So even an existing effect can be customised in this screen.

And actually, for this one, let’s save it to our library. So I’ll tap Save in the corner. I can rename it if I want to – I’ll just keep it as Gradient to make this nice and quick – and then we press Save.

And then, back in the effects library, I can tap onto My Effects at the top, and you’ll see Gradient is now there saved.

But there are going to be times when you’re using these lights where you just want them to be one colour. And we can change that really easily without needing to edit effects.

So at the bottom of the app on the tab bar, I’ll tap onto Controls, and this is where you can see any Twinkly devices added to your account. I can simply choose a colour. As quickly as that, I can make the whole tree turn red, or I can use the colour wheel to find the exact shade I’m looking for.

And then when you’re done, you can press Save to add it to the lights, or you can cancel and go and explore some other things.

Let’s do a little more exploring because there’s one last feature I really want to share before I finish this video.

The very last thing to explore is the way you can paint on the tree using your finger in any colour you like. It’s really clever.

So let’s go back into Effects, and we’re going to choose the effects wizard in the top right-hand corner. Now, earlier we used some of the different presets to choose the animation, but actually we’re going to go down now and choose Draw With Finger instead.

At this point, you get the map of the lights, but currently there are no lights on. So we can choose a colour at the bottom or use the colour wheel, and then we can brush our finger across the lights we want to light up. I’ll make the very bottom of the tree yellow, and just like that in real life, you can see my tree lighting up.

Let’s grab another colour and do the next section, and repeat that until the whole tree is done in four block colours.

Okay, that looks pretty good. Now, I’ll be honest – if I had more than 100 lights on a bigger tree, I could probably do some far better art than just colouring in four blocks of colours. But for now, that’s okay.

At the bottom, we have another button called Sparkle, and this feels like something we should explore very quickly. When you tap onto Sparkle, you can choose another colour, and then as you paint on top of the tree, it’s going to add little sparkles of that colour on top of the colour you’ve chosen already.

And that means I have lots of sparkly lights on top of my tree as well as those block colours that I chose. Then we can save the effect we’ve created, and we can give it a name. I just panicked and called it Colours – not a great name, to be honest – but now that will appear in the My Effects library as well.

And so that’s a really quick guide to getting started with Twinkly. I should mention at this point that I’ve done my lights on a tree, but actually there’s no reason why they have to be on a tree.

Your Twinkly lights could be anywhere. They could be on a bookcase. They could be across the dining room table. They could be decorating the corners of your bedroom. And they’ll all map in the same way using the app.

You can then customise the patterns, the effects, you can create your own, and you can really customise how you want your lights to appear.

I think in reality I’m going to probably spend the next two or three hours playing with these lights and trying all sorts of different effects, but you don’t need to watch all of that.

I hope this video has given you a quick guide to getting started with Twinkly lights – from pairing it to your phone to then customising how they look on the tree. I hope it’s given you some things to explore and to play.

Don’t forget the link in the description to find these lights on Amazon. And make sure you subscribe to my channel as well. I’m so grateful you watched this video. I’ll see you in the next one. Take care.