Nanoleaf’s Canvas panels will light up your walls, and they work with the Google Assistant

We’ve had our eye on Nanoleaf for some time, with their triangle-shaped light panels available for some time locally offering a customisable, programmable and controllable lighting solution for your home. The triangular, polygon-esque aesthetic doesn’t appeal to everyone though — enter Nanoleaf’s new Canvas light squares.

Canvas is in many ways an evolution of what the company started with their original Light Panels. They’re 15cm square and can be any colour you want. You can also connect them up in a variety of different ways. Once connected and powered, the panels light up your room with vivid, bright and colourful light. The company’s neat Rhythm feature add-on to their original light panels – allowing them to react to ambient sound, like music – is now built in too.

Where the original Nanoleaf light panels left some gaps at the triangle vertices, Canvas is completely lit edge-to-edge in the colour of your choice.

The Nanoleaf app lets you set the individual colour of panels, and assign “scenes” that animate light over the panels in formations (eg fireworks, a meteor shower, and more – and you can download scenes created by others too). Once you’ve set your Nanoleaf account up, you can connect it to your Google Home and control it with your voice.

A big difference this time around is that the main controller is its own panel, and it’s now touch-sensitive so you could walk past your Canvas installation and touch it to turn them on. You can also use it to control brightness, switch animation scenes and turn music visualisation on or off.

A single controller (a control square) can handle a much larger number of panels now, too (Nanoleaf says up to 500 panels can run from a single control square). The connection between panels is made with small inserts (“linkers”) that carry the signal between panels, and you don’t have to connect them in a straight up grid formation – half-grid placement is possible due to the way Nanoleaf has arranged the linker connections to give you a lot more display options.

If you’re looking to kit out your room with Canvas, you’ll be starting at $320 for a Starter Pack with 9 panels (one of which is a control square). Expansion packs are $110 for four additional panels. Packs come with mounting tape and Panels are in-store at JB Hi-Fi, or you can buy them online at Nanoleaf’s shop.

We love the customisation options Nanoleaf gives you, and we’ve got a Nanoleaf Canvas Starter Kit on the Ausdroid test bench so if there’s anything you want to know about it let us know in the comments and we’ll cover it in the review!