Homedics 11” Drift Sandscape, Compact Size, Zen Garden, Meditation Accessories, Decorative Sandscape, Smart LED Lighting, Wi-Fi Enabled (Black)

Northern lights
We love this drift! The northern lights is what we have it on most of the time. It is compact and amazing.

Great hardware, bad software and services
My wife got me one of these for Christmas and initially it was a miserable experience, because their services went down for nearly two days. Once the services were back up, everything has been working, but the experience of using the Drift is still not fully ideal.The actual hardware seems pretty great. It looks nice, and it feels solid and hefty. Unfortunately it seemed to have problems with my mesh wifi network and I had to a set up a dedicated 2.4ghz guest network to get it reliably connected to my network. It seems like this was a good idea in general for my home network, for devices like this, so while it was frustrating to figure out, the end result is fine and everything works.The app, meanwhile, feels like it is made out of popsicle sticks and chewing gum. It has no data caching layer, so every time you go to the patterns screen, it has to reload the pattern list from the cloud, which is a bit slow. Very often you get logged out of the app and have to log back in. It’s utterly ridiculous that you need to be connected to the internet to be able to simply use the unit. It’s ridiculous that if their online services go down, you can’t use it anymore. It “downloads” patterns to the device, but there’s no way to play them without the app connecting to their services first. The hardware has some cool additional lighting modes and effects available via the power cord remote, but those are unusable from the app and I have no idea how to access those anymore. The app has a few UX issues, like when you build a Playlist, you can no longer see the Favorite icon on patterns, so it’s nearly impossible to build a (very obvious) “Favorites” playlist without writing down the names of all your favorite patterns (why isn’t a ‘favorites’ playlist built in?). When selecting a pattern to play when the unit is fully stopped, it plays a random pattern and I have to click the Play button on the pattern again to get it to play the actual pattern I selected. Changing the color of the lighting while a pattern plays can interrupt the pattern being drawn and temporarily divert the ball, which ruins the pattern, for no obvious reason.What a mess! It feels like the people designing and building the app have never actually used this product in their home, because the shortcomings are painfully obvious.But, for this low of a price, it’s worth it. Similar sand table objects like this are much, much more expensive. So, you get what you pay for. You’re getting a high quality hardware unit that is hamstrung by ridiculous online services and a terribly made and designed app. Luckily, once you have the unit set up just the way you want it, you don’t need to use the app very often, and the only real ‘maintenance’ the device needs is to periodically even the sand back out as it will slowly get pushed to the edges by the patterns being drawn. It’s easy to imagine a much better version of this product, but it probably would not be available at this price point.

Homes is Drift
Love watching it but software is incredibly poor and difficult to manage. I’m surprised that Homedics uses such poor software. Very frustrating!

Great Hardware, Bad Software
Excellent build quality and packaging.Excellent product really!But the software it requires is absolutely not up to par with the product. While the design of the app is excellent, with many solid features and content – it simply doesn’t work most of the time.It took me 2 hours of trying to connect the device to my wifi, it just kept failing for no reason. Finally I got it to connect, and then it took another hour trying to get it to download patterns, kept failing there too. Then I finally had all my patterns and went to play the new playlist I created, and it has more issues connecting again. Switching between patterns doesn’t work properly either.I did finally get it shuffling between a good list of random patterns, seems to be working now. I’m afraid to change any settings to disturb it again..

I’m having significant trouble with this Drift Table from Homedics. While its drawing capabilities are impressive, persistent software errors, unstable Wi-Fi, and non-functional Bluetooth make it almost impossible to use.I’ve tried factory resetting it multiple times across my iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, but the issues persist. I’m seeking assistance to resolve these problems, as I invested $300 in this product and expect it to function as advertised.It’s become so frustrating that it’s anything but “Zen”.