I have all the new T2 bulbs. AMA
I’m in the US — was too impatient to wait for the staggered global release to reach our shores, so I just ordered them from German Amazon! 😄
For those curious like me, they ship with Matter-over-Thread firmware. Pairing was the fastest and most painless I have ever experienced with any Matter OR Thread product — scanned the Matter code from the bulb straight into Apple Home, and the light was ready to go in like two seconds.
(I don’t have the M3 hub or another Aqara border router, so I can’t comment on using it in Thread mode with the Aqara app.)
You can make the bulb switch to Zigbee using the Aqara app; the protocol change is not just a simple toggle, but requires a full firmware replacement/overwrite. This happens over Bluetooth and is therefore very fast. I didn’t time it, but I think it was under 2 minutes.
Initiating the firmware switcheroo is a little weird. You have to start trying to add the bulb to the Aqara app, scan the Matter code, and then you’ll get an option to change the firmware. There’s three steps (download new firmware, upload firmware to the bulb, wait for it to restart), but they go by so fast they could easily just have had it show up as a single progress bar.
In Zigbee mode, you can mercifully adjust the transition times, so if you want it to fade out over a period of 3s instead of 1.5s when turned off, that’s easy as pie. I was very pleasantly surprised that the bulbs expose a standard Zigbee energy metering cluster to report their own power usage — I was aware this was coming to a future revision of the Matter spec, so it’s nice to see Zigbee won’t be left out in this regard.
Want me to check/test something? Let me know!
I’m in the US — was too impatient to wait for the staggered global release to reach our shores, so I just ordered them from German Amazon! 😄
For those curious like me, they ship with Matter-over-Thread firmware. Pairing was the fastest and most painless I have ever experienced with any Matter OR Thread product — scanned the Matter code from the bulb straight into Apple Home, and the light was ready to go in like two seconds.
(I don’t have the M3 hub or another Aqara border router, so I can’t comment on using it in Thread mode with the Aqara app.)
You can make the bulb switch to Zigbee using the Aqara app; the protocol change is not just a simple toggle, but requires a full firmware replacement/overwrite. This happens over Bluetooth and is therefore very fast. I didn’t time it, but I think it was under 2 minutes.
Initiating the firmware switcheroo is a little weird. You have to start trying to add the bulb to the Aqara app, scan the Matter code, and then you’ll get an option to change the firmware. There’s three steps (download new firmware, upload firmware to the bulb, wait for it to restart), but they go by so fast they could easily just have had it show up as a single progress bar.
In Zigbee mode, you can mercifully adjust the transition times, so if you want it to fade out over a period of 3s instead of 1.5s when turned off, that’s easy as pie. I was very pleasantly surprised that the bulbs expose a standard Zigbee energy metering cluster to report their own power usage — I was aware this was coming to a future revision of the Matter spec, so it’s nice to see Zigbee won’t be left out in this regard.
Want me to check/test something? Let me know!