After watching the LED-strip tutorial on BRUH Automation, I decided I needed some LED-strips!
Simple and cheap WiFi-controller
After a lot of reading, I saw that HA supports WiFi module and MagicHome – so I ordered one from eBay.
I also ordered this LED strip (5050 RGB strip only).
You also need a power supply. I had some 12V power supplies that I used.
Having no expectations at all and thinking I would use all of my weekend on yet another solution (read the long road at the bottom). I could not have been more wrong.
The setup was one of the easiest I have ever encountered. Just plug it in, open the app and connect to the controller WiFi network when the app tells you to. The rest just works.
Adding it to Home Assistant
Just add three lines in the config, restart HA and your good to go.
You will find them with an entity ID like light.ab1c234d0e56_123456789. I didn’t have an icon to change the entity ID, so I added a name to the LED strip in customize.yaml.
You can find the documentation here: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/light.flux_led/
# Example configuration.yaml entry
light:
- platform: flux_led
automatic_add: True# Example customize.yaml entry
customize:
light.ab1c234d0e56_123456789:
friendly_name: TV LED-strip
icon: mdi:televisionThe long road, from NodeMCU to Meshle flex, to giving up
I ordered a Digital Adressable LED-strip and some of the 12 components from the BRUH video-description.
My first NodeMCU didn’t work. The 12V to 5V step-down ended up costing $200 i shipping (eBay can’t remember free-shipping option). I had to cancel my order and getting my money back. This was not a problem, but it took time.
Ordering things from China/Hong Kong takes about 1-2 months. At this time, I have used 6 months just trying to get the correct working parts for something I then have to build. In this process I got two Meshle flex in the mail, from a Kickstarter project I backed long time ago. Finally, I thought, a simple solution to most of my problems… My addressable LED-strip has a 3-pin connector, Meshle only supports 4-pin. So I ordered two new LED-strips from Elektroimportøren, to find out they had a 5-pin connector.
How hard could it be to get a simple LED-strip?
Then I had to order new LED-strips from eBay. This time I made sure they had a 4-pin connector. Meshle stated early in the progress that they where going to build support for Alexa, Home Assistant, etc.. While waiting for the new 4-pin LED-strips, I started looking for how to integrate Meshle with HA – without any luck. They hadn’t written anything about integrations in a long time.
While I ordered the new LED-strips from eBay, I also ordered the WiFi LED-controller to use with Magic Home. From reading the HA forum, they should work with HA and they where cheap – so I gave it a try.