Nanoleaf Canvas is the Lightshow for the Living Room

What is the Nanoleaf Canvas?

The Nanoleaf Canvas is a modular smart RBG light panel that connects to make patterns as creative as your imagination.  If you have a bare wall that's in need of decorating and want something that is entertaining and functional, this is the piece to get.  This is definitely be eye catching, especially on a pillar that we have in our house where you don't expect anything interesting to be.  All my friends that see this always ask what this is and are mesmerized by the pattern, and the motion of the lights.  Take a look at the video above.

These panels are RGB Colored light, meaning they can be any spectrum of color for any mood that you're feeling - Red for being dramatic, Light Blue for chill vibes, or just make it plain.   You can make the light whitish, or a soft warm light for reading.  Or you can let it react to your music.

Setup and connecting

How long is setup? For me it took 2 hours, but let me break it down. 

1 hour to set up the wifi connection.  This connects via 2.4 GHz wifi (802.11 b/g/n), although if you don't want it to connect to the internet it'll have some scenes and sequences already built in.  I had some special WiFi settings that needed to troubleshoot to let the Canvas connect to my network.  With that issue taken care of, it took 1 hour to put together the design and getting it onto the wall.  That included measuring the center of the pillar, figured out how far high on the wall it should go, and then mounting the panels.  Good thing it came with a few designs already to choose from instead of a 3x3 square.

Canvas sticks on with foam mounting tape, but they look like the 3M command foam stickies for posters.  I messed up the positioning one time and had to remove the tape which involves pulling and stretching the foam adhesive, so don't position the adhesive pull tabs too far in that you can't pull them out from behind later on if you want to move the panels around.

All the Canvas panels are connected to one Control module.  Each panel connects to each other using a hard solid linker provided with the kit.  As long as you're able to connect the panels to each other with a linker, the module/app will figure out what design was created.  Nanoleaf also sells a pack of 9 Flex Linkers that can bends up to 180 degrees so you could attach the panels to the ceiling, angled surface, etc.  And of course you can buy more of the Canvas panels themselves.  Nanoleaf sells Canvas Expansions in 4 and 25 packs.  How Many can you connect together under one control module? 500 panels could be controlled by a single control module, but you need 1 power every 25 panels.

Home Automation

What home automation ecosystems is the Canvas compatible with? Homekit, Google, Alexa, Smartthings, IFTTT.  Personally I am not fond of using Wifi as a method of connecting IoT smart devices to each other for security reasons. I use the other communication standards that Smartthings are compatible with - Z-wave and Zigbee to be exact.  It's still early to say how the new Matter smart standard will affect my thoughts on it, but at least Nanoleaf is on board with supporting it.  Currently, I'm not aware that Canvas will act as an edge router for Matter, but Elements will.  As of right now, there really isn't an official integration with Phillips Hue as they are the other big company with RGB lights, but they recently had a close integrated with Spotify, so here's to hoping for Spotify to integrate with Nanoleaf as well.

Here are my current Home automation settings for the Nanoleaf Canvas:
- From 7 AM to Midnight and when I'm home, turn on.  I leave it on the Rhythm (sound reactive) mode.
- Turn off at 12:30 am

Conclusion

Is Nanoleaf Canvas worth it? Yes, it has the best integration with a large, popular ecosystem with.  At around $200 regular price, it's definitely not something you would want to impulse purchase, but you can find them on sale for cheaper.