As the front runners for lifestyle RGB lighting, Nanoleaf has continued to lead the pack with some innovative new RGB lifestyle lighting.
The team has recently tried out their Floor Lamp, the Pegboard and the PC Screen Mirror. It has been quite a few years since I personally reviewed a Nanoleaf product, and I had an idea for the the Nanoleaf Rope Light.
tl;dr
The Nanoleaf Rope Light offers 5 metres of flexible, beautifully diffused smart RGB light with 70 customisable colour zones for creating vibrant wall art. While the lighting quality and scene customisation are excellent (including music sync and Matter compatibility), setting it up proved frustrating initially due to persistent Wi-Fi connectivity and firmware update issues with the app. These problems were magically resolved by a subsequent Nanoleaf app update, highlighting the need to keep software current. The light is indoor-only (IP20), is not trimmable or extendable, and requires screws for secure, permanent mounting (the 30 included clips are not corner-friendly). Despite the usual Nanoleaf pairing hiccups, it’s a strong, decently priced smart lighting option at A$149.99.
Nanoleaf Rope Light: Specs and First Impressions
Five metres of glorious light, with a width thickness of 6mm and a height of 15mm.
Nanoleaf claims the rope light has a smooth diffusion due to the silicone covering, with a maximum 300 lumens in brightness. I fired it up on my desk in the middle of the night the first time, and it was kind of blinding.
Under the hood are 420 LEDs (Musk would love this) and seventy colour zones in total.
Important notes to point out, the Rope Light is for indoor use only (IP20 – no protection against ingress by moisture or liquid), it is not extendable and definitely not trimmable.
A really random thought popped into my head when I first looked at the Rope Light in person. It would make an awesome Lasso of Truth, but the shape and weight (560 grams) would make it awkward in a cosplay outfit.
Setup and the Nanoleaf App Experience: The Usual Hiccups
If you just want to get the Rope Light fired up, then all you need to do is to plug the USB-C end of the light into the controller, which then plugs into a GPO (General Purpose Outlet).
The controller allows you to control the Rope Lightm,, including activating the music sync and cycling through the Nanoleaf preset lighting schemes. Naturally you can also adjust the brightness via the physical controller.
If you want to start playing with your own custom lighting schema, then you need to pair the Rope Light to the Nanoleaf app.
I am going to say upfront, that my personal experience on pairing Nanoleaf devices is less than stellar.
I remembered my very first rodeo with the Elements taught me that the app does not play nice with adblockers and VPNs. Whilst my network setup has changed substantially since then, I remembered to turn my phone back to a fair stock standard networking connection before I started this process.
The first time I paired the Rope Light went very smoothly, something that I appreciated doing gear testing at 2am. Then I ran into endless trouble trying to update to the latest firmware which the app says is available. After a lot of testing, I realised that the Rope Light was struggling to maintain a WiFi connection, even though I moved it close to the router with a clear line of sight.
No amounts of factory resets (hold down the power button until the Rope Light blinks red) helped. In fact the pairing process got worse.
Just as I reached out to the Nanoleaf team in frustration, an updated Nanoleaf app was pushed to the Google Play Store and it magically fixed the problems I have been dealing with. So yes, this is a long winded way of saying, keep your apps updated regularly.
Mounting, Corners, and Design Considerations
The Rope Light is very flexible, which can allow for some pretty tight bends. It is however, not really designed to go around corners of a room.
You could kind of make it go around an inside corner with a lot of care. Similarly with an outside corner it can be done with the right bend angle and you are more likely to get a slightly better outcome here.
At the end of the day while you can get some pretty tight bends in on a flat surface, the Rope Light is not really friendly to corners.
As soon as the Rope Light hit my desk, I faced an uphill battle. My Bengal is fascinated by it, and my daughter has absconded with it already.
I had intended to put up a Christmas tree design on the outside corner of my lounge, because a real one and my cats just won’t mix. Instead I was told (by a seven year old) that she wants a heart in a heart design. Child, it’s only a five metre length so it is one or the other.
After some negotiations and planning, it will remain in the lounge area. And for the time being it will be a Christmas tree design after which we will change it to a double heart design. Small parenting win!
Installation Tips: Sketching, Clips, and Permanence
Nanoleaf recommends sketching your design on the wall with a pencil first.
The next step is to stick the clips onto the wall with the double sided tape, and mount the Rope Light up to ensure you are happy with the result.
To securely fasten the clips, there are screw holes in the clips to secure them. This of course, makes the Rope Light a rather permanent fixture and not rental friendly. If you find that the Nanoleaf provided double sided tape is not doing the job, you could replace it with something stronger from the local hardware store. I make no promises that it does not mark your wall, but at least there won’t be holes?
Nanoleaf provides thirty clips for the mounting process, and the Rope Light just slots into them. I noticed there are numbers on the clips from one to sixteen. I have repeats in the numbers and varying numbers of each number. Not sure if there is a hidden reason behind it, but the clips all work the same.
In case it needs pointing out, put the clips on the STRAIGHT bits of the Rope Light. The clip will not bend.
To make a really tight bend stay in place, such as a small star on top of a Christmas tree, you really need to secure the clips into the wall with the provided screws (and likely hollow wall anchors which are not provided).
Designing and Painting Your Light Art
As part of the pairing process, the app wants you to take a photo of the wall you want to mount the Rope Light on and draw your design.
You can’t bypass this and complete the pairing process, but you can take any photo and draw a squiggle just to satisfy the requirement. This of course can be changed later, just like if you decide to change your mind and create something entirely new.
An important thing to remember when you draw your design is, where will it start, and where will it end? Remember the Rope Light must be powered and that wire must run from one end of the Rope Light to the controller, which in turn must be plugged into a GPO.
Following the proper process, I created the design, mounted the Rope Light on the wall and took a photo of it. I then traced the design on screen and tap the Analyze Design button.
The app then renders your design into 70 segments which you confirm or redo.
As the last step you simply tap on the end where you want the power to run from. It will be denoted with a green icon instead of a grey one.
Once this is done, the initial setup process is considered complete and the real fun begins.
I opt to create a scene from scratch, after all, how hard can it be to light up a Christmas tree right? Oh did I mention that I am not very creative?
Creating the scene was made simple when I can pick the colour and hue, and just “paint” onto the design. I can also tap each segment to change that segment’s colour. As you can see in the photo, the outer bits of my design are all different colours to mimic baubles.
It was so easy to do that even I could do it without training wheels, and got a nod of approval from Miss Arraiya.
If doing the heavy lifting is not your thing, you can always fall back on the basic palette that Nanoleaf has available by default, or grab a community one that takes your fancy.
A few gripes about the app
As I mentioned earlier, I had issues with keeping a stable WiFi connection and updating the firmware from 3.x to 4.0.0.
Since the app was updated, I was able to update to 4.0.0 without issues. Subsequently I was also able to update to 4.0.12 without issues.
There were other niggling issues. When I logged into my Nanoleaf account on my daughter’s device, the Rope Light refused to connect to the app. I got around it by resetting it and pairing it to her device so she can play with the scenes.
A few times the app said to create scenes, the Rope Light must be connected to WiFi. It was connected to WiFi at the time. On and off I encountered this issue especially straight after the pairing process.
Feature Request: Twinkling Segments
Hey Nanoleaf, if you are listening, I would love to be able to vary the brightness in each segment of the Rope Light. It would give me a faux twinkling effect. I know it would play havoc with the brightness slider, but you could do it as a percentage against a baseline? Like 25%, 50% or 75% of the maximum brightness of the line segment.
Final Verdict
It simply would not be Nanoleaf without some pairing hiccups, at least in my experience. However the current version of the app seems to have largely resolve the issues I encountered.
I would suggest that Nanoleaf throw in a 5m piece of string to help with the planning process. It is not practical to wrangle the Rope Light on the wall all the time, and free hand sketching is hard to keep track of the length.
As a lifestyle mood light, I have to say that the light is nicely diffused and smooth. With seventy colour zones over five metres, that works out to be one segment of colour per 7.14 centimetres. Whether you want to go all control freak, take on the basic scene, or have it sync to your music, Nanoleaf have your back on it.
The last thing I do want to bring up is that the Nanoleaf Rope Light only emits light out of the top silicone covering. It is not a cylindrical rope with lights emitting all 360 degrees. So that thing about the Lasso of Truth? Doesn’t really work.
The Nanoleaf Rope Light is available from their website for A$149.99, which is a decent price for a very nice offering. With the festive season approaching, this could be just the finishing flare to the atmosphere.
DRN would like to thank Nanoleaf for providing the review unit.
