The Govee Mini Panel Lights are programmable, modular smart lights which offer a highly customizable way to illuminate your room. Its customization options are amazing, ranging from solid colors, to animated scenes, and responding to music, but getting your dream smart light wall may be a costly endeavor.
Govee Mini Panel Lights
The Govee Mini Panel Lights are a customizable, modular smart lighting system with easy setup and high-quality LED lighting. The Govee Home app is the main control option, but these lights integrate with smart home platforms like Amazon Alexa.
- Simple setup, both physically and in the Govee Home app
- Huge amount of easy-to-apply customization options
- Community sharing of presets adds much more customization
- Lights are bright but not overwhelming
- Colors are clear and saturated
- Some inconsistencies settings
- Default animation speeds for many scenes are too fast
- Slowing animated scenes can look choppy
- Adhesive for placement makes adjustments on setup difficult
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Price and Availability
The Govee Mini Panel Lights are available on Govee’s website and Amazon. At full price, a 10-pack costs $99.99, a 20-pack costs $149.99, and a 10-pack expansion with lights and no cables is $59.99.
Setup Is Simple and Intuitive
While time-consuming, the setup process is incredibly simple and intuitive. From start to finish, the basic setup took around 40 minutes to unbox the lights, read the how-to guide, pick where to place the lights, make a design, put them on my wall, and follow subsequent setup in the Govee Home app on my smartphone. One more intuitive aspect of setting them up was that the app perfectly recognized my design, and all I had to do to confirm it was to rotate it to match its orientation on my wall.
The box includes a small level, which helped ensure my lights weren’t awkwardly crooked. That said, because the lights use adhesive, making adjustments to achieve level is difficult, and I opted to start using a pre-leveled light switch to get started.
The Govee Mini Panel Lights Have Huge Customization Potential
Customization options include solid colors, animated scenes, syncing with music, a community-sharing space for custom presets, a DIY option to create effects, finger sketching for quick colorization, and AI-generated colors based on a prompt. Each of these is fairly self-explanatory and intuitive when used, and each creates a unique way of using the lights.
Of these, I find the music option to be a potential seizure risk. It flashes the lights in sync with whatever audio is in your room using several presets, and some of them flash bright and rapidly.
Scenes Are the Easiest Way to Get Great Lighting
Among the customization options, I find that Govee’s preset scenes offer the best avenue to making the most of these lights. Each scene provides different color schemes animated in different ways, ranging from twinkling on each panel to cascading across all panels. You can customize the speed of most scenes, which I’d recommend, as the defaults are a bit too flashy. My only complaint with lowering speed is that animations can become choppy, with each step becoming visible.
Conversely, higher animation speeds in scenes can be a bit too fast, with lights flashing at a distracting pace.
My second-biggest complaint with it is that the pre-made scenes’ colors often don’t correspond with the colors that they generate on the lights themselves. For example, the Soothing setting shows a blue and pink gradient on a snail, but the output is actually a cascade of orange, yellow, and warm white.
Similarly, the scene categories’ names are a bit confusing. With categories like “Funny” and “Festival,” it’s hard to know what style exactly corresponds to each category, which compounds on top of mismatched icons and colors.
Integrations With Amazon Alexa and Other Apps
To pair with Alexa, all I had to do was tap the option in the Govee Home app. After a few seconds of following a couple of prompts in the app, my Echo Dot said that a new device was linked, and commands such as “Alexa, turn on my Govee Mini Panel Lights” worked flawlessly.
My Elgato Stream Deck on my Mac has a plugin for Govee lights, too, but it requires far more steps than Alexa. First, I had to apply for a Govee API Key via the smartphone app, await a response from their customer service, and then plug that key into my Stream Deck to control it there. Even then, the Stream Deck’s plugin has far fewer settings than the app, but I’ll never complain about more ways to use something conveniently.
Should You Buy the Govee Mini Panel Lights?
The Govee Mini Panel Lights are an incredibly unnecessary item in terms of practical utility. That said, they majorly improve the aesthetic of your space, and they are actually quite bright lights. Although most people don’t need them—especially at their price—their great quality, intuitive setup, and vast customization options make them a fantastic pick for anyone considering smart lights. I enjoy them, and I’m glad to have them in my setup at home.
