The Tap Dial is my favorite accessory for Philips Hue Lights and I use it every day

I have smart lights at home and I can control them in different ways. The easiest way is probably my smartphone or a smart speaker or display. And for the most part, that should be enough. But I was looking for another way to control my lights in their home that was easy and also gave me more control, and I found what I was looking for.

While I can now find other brands of smart bulbs – and at much lower prices – Philips Hue is perhaps the most well-known and offers a solid range of smart lighting solutions for indoors and outdoors. Whether I want my lighting to be hidden away or whether I am looking for unique lamps that are designed to be displayedPhilips Hue has them.

However, it’s not just about the lamps. Hue also has a fairly wide range of accessories. One accessory that is one of the best for me is the Philips Hue Hue Tap dial. Available in black and white with a $50 price tag, the Tap Dial is a small puck-shaped light controller that you can press and turn, giving it a “smart analog” vibe.

Read more: The complete guide to Philips Hue

At first glance it is a simple and expensive way to control your lights

While it may seem like a bit much to spend $50 on a glorified light switch, especially considering it’s almost the same price as a single light switch Philips Hue 75W White and Color Ambiance lamp. That said, if you’re like me and are firmly steeped in the Hue ecosystem, you’ve probably already come to terms with the fact that it’s an expensive ecosystem to operate in. But that’s not all: the customization options for this little guy will excite crafters, and I believe it’s well worth the price.

The watch face itself looks like a hockey puck with four buttons on the front, with a rotating outer wheel to brighten or darken your lights. The four buttons each have small dots numbered from 1 to 4, so that you can feel which button you press, even in the dark. It’s quite small and it’s not a chore to take it from room to room if you want. You can place it on the wall in the included wall bracket and use it as a typical light switch. And it’s magnetic, so you can stick it to your refrigerator or any other metal surface.

Under the hood, the customization options are insane

You might think that installing this little device would be easy, with just a few options, but you’d be wrong. The Tap Dial settings can be a bit complicated and may take some tinkering to get just right, especially if you have multiple scenes you want to cycle through.

In fact, I completely missed the feature in the app, or within the almost two years I had the watch face, Philips solved my biggest problem. I’m not sure what’s true, but my biggest pet peeve was thinking you could only use the Tap Dial for one room or “zone” in your house. And again, while this was always the way the device functioned, this has now (in my mind) been resolved and you can assign each button to a different room or zone in your house. However, the twist to dim function can only be assigned to one room at a time, which makes sense.

To set this up, go to the Hue app and then go to Institutions > Accessories > and select your Tap Dial. From there you can assign functions to each of the buttons. First you must choose whether the button will control your lighting or an automation. If you choose the former, you’ll need to choose the button behavior when you press it:

• Time-based light: Lighting based on the time of day or based on a custom time schedule of your choice.
• Scene cycle: Choose a primary scene that always starts when you press the button. Keep pressing to cycle through additional light scenes.
• Single scene: Always only the same scene when pressing the button.
• Lights out: Selected lights turn off when the button is pressed.

By default, pressing and holding any of the buttons turns off the lights assigned to it, but you can choose to turn off all the lights in your entire home or do nothing. There’s also an advanced ‘smart on/off’ option, which I haven’t worked with yet.

Once you’ve adjusted the buttons to your liking, your last stop is to choose what the dial does – or what else it does besides brighten or dim your lights. There are only two options here, and both are easy to customize. The first is choosing whether you want to turn your lights off completely with the dial, or if you only want them to go to minimum brightness when you turn to dim them. The second gives you the option to set a specific scene that turns on when you turn the dial while the lights are off.

You can make your installation as simple or complex as you want, making the Tap Dial accessible to everyone.

While the Tap Dial rarely goes on sale, it sometimes gets a small discount here and there. And despite all it can do, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has decorated their home with Hue lights.

Hungry for more? Don’t miss this video overview of the best Philips Hue Lights, where the Tap Dial appears so you can see it in action.