Hi guys, I have a couple of LED-lights that are integrated into my porch. The remote I got from the installation-guy is a 2.4Ghz remote. It looks like a rather generic one. I was wondering if this would also be doable to control through HA?
If it some basic soldering, I’m okay with that, but I’m not an expert by any means
Basic funtionalities are (obviously) turning the lights on and off, and also dimming them.
I’m stuck with some of these 2.4 gHz ‘private’ remotes as well and have yet to find a good solution.
Reverse engineering signals in 1+ gHz range requires some strong chops and expensive tools and even if you get to that point you most likely run in to encryption of the signals.
Best I’ve done is purchase one or more extra remotes and wire a ESP xx device to ‘press the buttons’. This is sub optimal, as you have no feed back on what state the light is at or ends up at. Even worse, at least yours looks like it has separate one and off buttons. If you just have a power toggle button the ‘state’ knowledge is even worse.
The other painful path is to try and reverse engineer the controller in the fixture and replace it with something like a ESP xx or zigbee device that you can program and control.
Good hunting! This is a problem in need of a solution!
Would buying an additional remote even work? I think it would have to be “paired” in some way to the actual lights? And I have no idea how to do that since the electronics controlling those are built into the porch, and I am quite hestitant to start opening those up to be honest.
Yes, this a rather vexing area. First off, there are some rather nice, of good quality, useful and of good price lightening elements available via these various manufactures. But, as you and I have found the ‘smarts’ of these lights is either via these ‘odd’ remotes or via a less than ideal remote cloud service in a remote country…
Getting an ‘after market’ remote is a ‘roll of the dice’ as their no standards. At best, you can hope that since the design and engineering costs are high, vendors often just copy from others 100%. Another, unfortunate ‘truth’ of these lighting devices (and other products) is the statement ‘if it is good, it is gone’. So I have the ‘rule’ when I find something that works : ‘why buy one when you can by two for twice the price’ and I have a replacement that will prolong the life of my solutions somewhat (and I often get a 2nd remote with the 2nd unit ’
A shopping ‘tip’ I have found when buying from these various vendors (will not help you here unless you 'rip and replace your current solution) is that many of these vendor are selling their lighting devices in ‘three flavors’, 1) totally dumb smart : the device is controlled by power toggling the light switch 2) a configuration with these non standard 2 gHz remotes, what you have now and 3) ‘smart’ via the Tuya cloud.
It is this ‘third’ configuration, if they make it that offers a little hope for getting a ‘cool and useful’ light that you can give a brain transplant to in order to get to 100% local smart control. With some but unfortunately not all of these device with the 3rd option, you can either do a software only firmware replacement to the controller in these devices or a but harder do a unsolder of the controller chip and solder in a pin compatible replacement chip. Again, a path that take some work and is not a guarantee. But can be worth the effort in some cases. You can google ‘tuya replacement’ and ‘open beken’ to find some of the folks doing this stuff.
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