Advice needed for LED Strips

Good Morning,

Bit of a noob when it comes to hardware (well all actually) and I was wondering for some advice please. I have a Fibaro RGBW dimmer 2 which was accidentally bought at the start of the year and has just sat in its box as I didn’t need it.

I am now setting up HASS at work to be a monitoring system for various things and I would like some LED strips to indicate things in the office. I would be looking at roughly 2 x 2meters as we have a steel beam running through the office and I thought it would be good to use that as our “status beam” which can light up when there are issues or notifcations.

The only problem is I have no idea what equipment I need so I was wondering if someone could please link me to everything that is required.

My setup so far:

Raspberry Pi 3 - Not that close to where the led strip is
Aeotech Z-Stick Gen5
Fibaro RGBW Dimmer 2

I think I need the following:

LED Strips
Power supply
Jumper wires

But have no clue as to what/which ones exactly. I am looking at doing this reliatively cost effective so please do not go recommending the most expensive things and I would say the use of the Fibaro is required as I already have it.

I have a Mains power socket roughly 2 meters away from the beam.

Thanks in advance for any support / advice it is much appreciated and will certainly get reused when I move into my new house as I will be using the same!

Kind Regards,
Max

Well, that dimmer can take 12V or 24V power, and with only 4 meters either will work. I’d probably suggest 24V for simplicity, and flexibility.

IMO you’ll need:

  • Power supply sufficient for your LED strip (this one)
  • 5 meters of LED strip - you likely want either 60 LED/m or above (like this)
  • Some extension cabling to run between the controller and the strips (like this)
  • A barrel plug connector for between the power supply and Fibaro (like these)
  • Maybe a connector for the second strip (like this)
  • Heat shrink tubing to insulate the connections between the extension cable and the strip (like this)
  • A small box to put the controller in and protect the dimmer and connections (maybe this)
  • Maybe some cable trunking to make it all look neat (similar to this)
  • Aluminium trunking to put the strip in if it’s not doing directly on the steel beam - it’ll also act as a heat sink to cool the LEDs

When I did this (Zigbee vs Z-Wave, but the principle is the same) I bought the strip, power supply, and cabling from AliExpress. I already had the other parts from previous projects.

Thank you @Tinkerer much appreciated. Just ordered it all will post an update how I get on. Quite excited about this project uaing HASS at work to monitor our entire network / servers / storage etc. Livened it this week initially monitoring all the network switches (~50) and availability of the physical servers (resources to come later). It already alerys us over our walkie talkies and email of any faults and this will add light notification to our office.