Hi, we have some custom build wardrobes that I’d like to be able to add some interior lights to that come on when we open the door. Looking for advice and recommendations from the community.
Two strips of LEDs 70-80cm would be perfect. I have a couple of UK plug sockets available at the back of the wardrobe and can drill holes to route cables as required. Using some Aqara contact sensors as triggers should be trivial.
My setup is home assistant on a NUC using a Sonoff Zigbee dongle. ZHA and emulated HUE for lighting. I got rid of the standard hue hub and have a pretty large and reliable zigbee network around my house. Would greatly prefer to go Zigbee rather than Wifi for the wardrobe lights.
Essential features:
- no internet server reliance
- warm white lights
- Bright during the day
- Dimmed significantly when one of us in bed (I go to bed late/my partner gets up very early for work so idea is to have 5-10% brightness if someone is asleep).
Nice to have:
- ability to change colour temperature so warmer at night, more neutral in day.
- zigbee
All my LED strips at present are Hue. As a result I have various offcuts I could re-use for this (both v2 - standard 6-pins, and the newer (v4 I think) more compact six pin).
Thus far I have shortlisted two options:
-
buy yet more brand new hue lights strips largely to get their controller and PSU. The cheapest is the Hue Lightstrip plus. Could probably get these for circa £60 each, £50 if I wait for Prime Day. Obviously this would ‘just work’. The downside is price and even more wastage as I’ll have even more offcuts that I can’t do anything with.
-
use a Gledopto Pro controller and rewire my hue offcuts. I really thought this would be the way to go but after pricing it all up, I’ve realised that it’s not actually much cheaper than the option 1:
Pretty much £100, though I do like the idea of learning something for the future.
I also read about the QuinLED products (pre-assembled ESP32) but they are all out of stock.
I’m hopeful that the good people here might be able to advise of more alternatives and/or may have insights from doing similar projects and perhaps working with a Geldopto unit. I’d have thought this was a fairly common project but not actually found a huge amount on google, especially with regards to reusing Hue Lightstrip offcuts and extensions.
I’m not great with a soldering iron hence trying to pickout parts for a no-solder approach, but could do non-fiddly stuff if required. I also don’t write code but happy with yaml file editing and a bit of ChatGPT-powered reworking of existing code.
Many thanks for reading.