Xiaomi to launch global Yeelight Aurora Devices, and Firmware Updates to Solve Bulb Flickering

Xiaomi recently announced a “coming soon” global launch of a new product called Yeelight Aurora Lightstrip Plus, set to be released on September 7^th. Exact product details are a bit unclear, but the Yeelight Aurora Lightstrip Plus is described as being an “extendable AI smart light strip equipped with 16 million colours”. The original Yeelight Lightstrip came in a length of 2 meters, but the Yeelight Aurora Plus will apparently have multiple length options – 6 meters, 10 meters, and 20 meters. 20 meters is really long for a light strip, so we’re assuming its for people who have really long hallways or want to do some kind of floor-to-ceiling doorway decorating.

In any case, the Xiaomi Yeelight Aurora Lightstrip Plus will be compatible with Google Assistant / Amazon Alexa / Mijia / IFTTT, and ithough it will not be a multi-color strip as competitors Philips Hue and LIFX already have available. This is definitely a bit of a drawback, though its justified by the much lower price of Yeelight’s products – a multicoloured strip from LIFX currently costs about 99 EUR / 115 USD, whereas Yeelight’s strips are only about 25 EUR / 30 USD – though of course, the price will almost certainly depend on the length.

This “global launch” is a bit of good news for the Yeelight series of devices, as currently, many users report technical difficulties when using the U.S. servers in the Yeelight app, and Yeelight forum mods typically recommend that people use the China servers instead. So with this global launch, there may be some adjustments and fixes made to the various server locations outside of China.

Yeelight Bulb Firmware Updates to Solve Flickering

In other news for the Yeelight series of devices, it seems that they’ve finally figured out the problem of Yeelight bulbs flickering when high command rates are sent – this occurs on both V1 and V2 bulbs. The problem stems from high command rates being sent, as we said – for example, telling the lights to quickly change colors at rates lower than 300 milliseconds, and the brightness quickly going up and down.

Yeelight forum staff responded to a user’s request (the developer of the Jeelight for PC app) for investigation into this issue, and made the following post:

“Hi, we have noticed this issue and have a fix (based on our understanding) now. The new version is open for beta users. Would you mind providing your Xiaomi Accound ID so that we can append onto the whitelist? Thanks.

PS: For the update to take effect, you need to update the firmware and replace the effect string “smooth” with “linear”. E.g. to turn the bulb red:
{“method”:“set_rgb”,“params”:[255,“linear”,100]}”

So while the fix isn’t available to everyone just yet, it should be soon after a little bit of testing, as Yeelight generally responds very quickly to its development community.

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