I have a confession to make. I hate sleeping. It’s dull, time-consuming, and always gets in the way of fun things, but it does provide me with one big benefit: a rested brain. My circadian rhythm has been all over the place after 12 years of working nights. Despite that, I have never suffered from insomnia. Something tells me, that the main reason for that, is not moving to bed until I’m absolutely sure that I’m ready for sleep. Why Novostella – Good Night Light?
Well…
Bad night problems
I recently moved the living areas around at home. The new bedroom is darker than Dart Vader’s heart on a moonless night. It’s something I solved with my smart wall switch already, but there is a catch. Both lights wake up my wife as they are too bright, and I cannot sneak out to the bathroom in the middle of the night without risking stepping on her toes (or more fragile parts). There isn’t any space around the bed to walk by, and she claimed her side of the bed already.
For better or worse, my wife and I share the 2nd problem. From time to time, our active brains prevent us from falling asleep until our brains finished processing whatever we had been working all day. We know for a fact, that we won’t get a good night sleep until our biological CPUs are done for the day. Distracting active brains with sounds helps. White noise and ambient sounds seem to work much better than music. Frogs in particular. Frogs are my favourite!
Novostella – Good Night Light
We don’t have kids (it’s a work in progress thing) so looking at “baby lights” wouldn’t occur to me. It’s a surprisingly low on IoT solution to my problems but it works. Novostella – Good Night Light solves these issues in the following way:
- LED light can be very dim
- RF remote and touch control removes the need for voice commands
- built-in speaker with white noise (ambient sounds)
My trips to the bathroom (or the fridge) are usually around 3 am. I’m not at liberty to whisper to Amazon Echo, so capacitive touch controls and RF remote are perfect to operate the light silently.
Apart from the light and sound controls, remote comes with 3 timers (15/30/60min). It’s everything you would need from a smart light. The unit is powered by USB-C and the touch sensor toggles the lights and changed the colour presets.
Lights up
The biggest advantage of Novostella – Good Night Light is a perfectly difussed LED light. Strong enough to illuminate the room enough to see all important details, dim enough to keep my wife asleep while I navigate the room without hitting anything.
There are 7 colour presets to pick from (using remote). It may not seem like a lot at first, but it’s a night lamp, not a disco ball. I use white and sunset colours. Anything else is just fancy extra I have little desire for.
Sound on
A top-placed speaker is louder than I need it to be. In fact, I wish I could turn the min volume down a notch as the light rests above our heads. Apart from 3 lullabies, there are 8 sounds loops including my favourite frogs, rain, thunder, water, forest, fire wind and crickets.
The sound has decent quality, but the loops are little too short. They last about 8 seconds each and some are blended better than others. I found that my brain instantly focuses on sounds, picks the loops apart looking for sounds imperfections. Then repetition of the process eases it gently to sleep.
Novostella – Good Night Light probably will fool infants if they find ambient sounds soothing. For the best effect put it further away from the bed.
Hacking?
I’m yet to open this thing. If I could find a way to push my own recordings, that would be great! The lamp is big enough to hide a Raspberry Pi Zero or an ESP32 board. Something tells me that sooner or later I will see if I could smart it up a little bit.
Final thoughts
I never expected to find a good use for Novostella – Good Night Light. Turns out, it’s a decent fit not just for parents with small kids, but couples in their late 30s with sleep and narrow bedroom problems! If only Novostella would find a way to stop my wife from recording me snoring 😂🤣😂 And you? How do you sleep at night? Let me know in this Reddit thread.
