Which LOTUSLAMP app controls your light?

The light is powered, Bluetooth is on, and the device list in the app stays empty. Most often the light is fine and the phone is running the wrong app. We build the controllers inside these lights and we write the apps that drive them: each app speaks one control protocol, and an app that cannot speak your controller's never lists it, however long it scans.

If the box names an app, use that one

Look at the packaging, the leaflet and any printed card before anything else. A QR code or a named app there is the build matched to your controller, and it beats every rule below. On some models pairing is easier with the light still in the box, so do this before you unpack.

The name may not be one of the five main apps. Alongside them we publish LotusPixel, LotusScreen, LotusLamp CCT, LotusLamp Echo, LotusCloud, IoTLite, LIDU, BBT Lights, PixelsPlay and RgbPlay for particular product lines, and white-label builds for partner brands that ship our controllers under their own name. An app with an unfamiliar name can still be ours underneath.

Nothing named at all? Work through the three questions below, or jump to the full reference table if you already know the product category.

Step 1: what kind of light is it?

The physical form settles most cases on its own.

Festive strings are the product line where people most often download the wrong app: a string that changes colour looks like a job for a colour app, but the Christmas strings in the table above pair with Lotus Lantern.

Step 2: if it is a strip, does colour move along it?

This is the distinction between our two colour apps, and it is the one customers get wrong most often. Power the strip up on whatever mode it ships with and watch it from across the room for ten seconds.

Once the right colour app is connected, two settings live in its settings pop-up rather than on the main screen: Pixels, the number of addressable points on an RGBIC strip, and Modify Pin Sequence, for when red comes out green.

If it is a bulb, there is no controller to identify

A bulb is the one category with no separate controller. The control electronics sit inside the lamp, the phone talks to the bulb over Bluetooth directly, and there is no data line, no line sequence and no chain order to get wrong. Almost the whole class of problems covered in wrong colours and line sequence cannot happen to a bulb.

What you trade for that simplicity is range and count. Bluetooth reaches a room, not a house, and each bulb is its own device: twelve bulbs are twelve pairings, whereas twelve metres of strip on one controller is a single one. That is what Step 3 is about, and it matters more for bulbs than for anything else on this page.

If a bulb shipped with a physical remote, the remote works independently of the app and keeps working if the pairing is lost. Press it before you blame the software: it is the quickest way to confirm the bulb is alive.

Step 3: how many lights are you controlling?

One light, or a handful you are happy to control one at a time, needs nothing special. Stay with the app from Step 1 or 2.

Several fixtures that should behave as one installation, a whole room of ceiling lights or lighting that responds as a group, want mesh networking instead of point-to-point Bluetooth. Adding a light to iMeshting takes one extra step, choosing the device type and the room it belongs to; that step is what makes "all the lights in the living room" a single thing to act on later. Ceiling fan lights run on it for the same reason, and the wall switch has to stay on for it to work: see why the wall switch breaks smart control.

The five main apps

Each app's first connection looks slightly different: some scan as soon as they open, others have an explicit add-device step. The flow for each of the five is shown in pairing a light for the first time.

Full reference: all 40 product categories

The complete mapping between the product categories we manufacture and the app that controls each one.

Lotus Lantern

LotusLamp X

Magic Lantern

iMeshting

LightsPlay

Every app we publish is free

Right app, still not connecting?

With the right app installed, an empty device list nearly always comes down to one of three things.

The full failure table, and what a light that connects but does not respond is telling you, is in pairing a light for the first time.

Questions about a specific light of ours? Contact us.