Best LED strips for Home assistant?

Hardware
1

I’ve been using the Alitove LED strips hooked up to an ESP8266 with WLED on it and it works great! However I’m seeing these Govee RGB LED strips for half the price but it doesn’t look like you can connect these to an ESP8266? Do these led strips work with HomeAssistant and be controlled, I do notice they are 12V as well?

Thanks!

3 Likes
2

You can get some pretty cheap LED strings from Aliexpress or Amazon. I would recommend individually addressable LEDs though as they are (imo) simpler to wire up, not much more money, and waaay cooler.

Govee does have some Individually addressable offerings, but if you’re planning on wiring them up for WLED, I’m recommend skipping Govee and just purchasing the LED strip itself. If you want something that’s cheap and works with HomeAssistant out of the box, then Govee is a good option.

3 Likes
3

ok cool thanks for confirming that. For the Govee lights, how do they work with Homeassistant directly? wifi, zigbee, etc?

4

When connected through the Govee controller (NOT WLED):

  • Bluetooth-only devices do not connect to HomeAssistant whatsoever. When purchasing Govee products for this use case, confirm that they advertise WiFi or Voice Assistant compatibility to avoid these.

  • WiFi-capable devices will interface with HomeAssistant through the Govee API, which uses cloud polling. Depending on the amount of Govee devices you have, this can get slow due to the 60 polls/minute limitation of the Govee API.

2 Likes
5

ah awesome thanks for that!!

Ok so I’m definitely sticking with WLED and what I’ve been doing then, I’m not doing cloud polling at all especially for LEDs lol

Thanks!

6

Yeah, cloud polling works, but it’s not ideal. I’ve been trying to get everything local in my smart home, and I’m going to try to migrate my Govee light strips over to WLED in the near future.