Yongnuo YN360 controlling more than 1

Hi A lot of people think you can only control one lamp at a time, to be fair it’s a bit tricky. I needed a program called “bluetooth ble” to kinda crack the problem on my iPad.

Also on the App Store there are a few apps “Yongnuo yn360” , and one just called “Yongnuo”. The Yongnou yn360 app is very basic and really only good for a single yn360 it can’t do what the “yongnuo” app can.

The first issue is getting more than 1 yn360 paired I used a program called bluetoothBLE this automatically connected my 2nd yn360 to my iPad if you press the battery level button as well as giving battery remaining it also gives access to channels H1 to H8 You almost certainly will want to have 2 or more yn360 units on individual channels.

Ok so assuming you are using h1 and h2 let’s try to adjust the warm white channel on h1 set the level now switch to h2 and adjust the level on that now switch between h1 and h2 you will notice 1 channel reports back its level the other doesn’t it doesn’t matter too much but one will show its at 0% while the other gives its value but that’s ok you are controlling 2 or more now with the yongnou app and you can set ratios

Turning the lights off kind of wrecks things e.g if I have 40% on H1 and set 58% on H2 when i turn both on the levels are at 58% the last set value.

RGB mode at the top of the app there is a right arrow this takes you to color model if you want to set h1 select h1 move to color model say set it green go back a page select h2 and then go to color model and set the color say blue. now one is blue the other green. if you turn off a yn360n from the color page as long as you stay on that page it will turn back on with that color if you leave that page then go back it turns back on at 0% bit of a pain but you can very quickly dial in what you want each lamp to be at.

Top of the screen should be yongnuo led tapping that brings up a device list but its kinda useless e.g it spotted my mac, a couple of appletvs but didnt do anything with them, mac didnt appear to recognise it was connected via the yongnuo app. it recognised 1 yn360 but not the other 🙁

Next at the top of the app is a left arrow this brings up “create model” there are 5 preset models with different effects preprogrammed in the names are in chinese however under there is add. you will probably want to keep the initial presets as is, they are all set for channel H1 by default but you can program them for other channels.

You can add your own preset , you might want to copy an original as a starting point. creating a ‘new construction’ your basic blocks are

  • channel,
  • duration,
  • effect (flashing,gradation,normally on)

Dual or single mode this lets you use white modes and rgb modes or either for that programmed block, you can chain blocks.

So I set ch1, 1 second, normally on and turned red up. I then did the same but this time with blue. saving these blocks back on the main edit page i set repeat to 10 and hit play the light went red for a second blue for a second, and did this 10 times. you will have to play around with it to do something more interesting.

Each program block works on a single channel but yes you can do something on h1 and follow up with something on h2 pressing play repeatedly seems to skip to the next block. If you want to work these in parallel it may work best with 2 controllers e.g an ipad and an iphone. This will get you feedback from both yn360’s at the same time however if you are running programs you might be ok with 1. It would be much better if you could get feedback from both on a single controller.

Now you know what software to use its limitations and workarounds it’s up to you to be creative. it’s not too hard to create a preset to set different lights to individual settings e.g orange on h1 teal on h2 using a single controller but you may find it just easier to use individual controllers. Since you can then mix realtime. Hope this helps.

Update more tricks.

There are some interesting options available once bluetooth is enabled on the YN360 if both are set to the same channel, the app controls both sticks together.  However a hidden feature is that each stick can be a controller too, with 2 or more YN360’s on the same channel you can control the remote ones from the one in hand, and you can switch channels on the local yn360 and adjust another YN360 remotely. If you are not interested in using the local one switch it to an empty channel and turn it off. You can also turn off the remote ones too