Christmas Light Show

Hi guys!

Anyone has any idea of how I can create a Christmas light show synced to music using only smart plugs?

My house doesn’t have RGB LED lights yet (maybe next year!) but all my white led strings are connected to individual tuya smart plugs already integrated into HA. So I would be playing with turning on and off the lights according to the song rhythm.

I heard about using XLights but it seems this solution is more applicable when you have controllable RGB led strips/strings.

Any other ideas?

Check out Vixen 3 (http://www.vixenlights.com/). Both it and xLights are used by Christmas display enthusiasts to do what you’re talking about. Both xLights and Vixen are controller-agnostic, so you should be able to configure your tuya devices as ‘controllers’ in either software package and have them controlled by the sequencing software.

Well… so my question is… How can I integrate home assistant to those software? It looks like the integration would work pretty well between WLED and xLights but all I have here is some smart plugs to turn on and off my LED strings.

I don’t think the relays on the smart plug will be quick enough for anything more than a slow strobe…

I totally agree! But I just intend to do something very basic with 10 devices. With that number and considering the speed of a smart plug, I can, for example:
t0 - turn on all devices
t0 + 1s - turn off device 1
t0 + 2s - turn off device 2
t0 + 3s - turn off device 3
t0 + 4s - turn on device 1

It would probably work well.

I though about doing it using automation but it would be a pain in… haha

xLights (and I assume Vixen as well) uses the e1.31 protocol (among others). There are several protocols available for this sort of thing, however, Home Assistant doesn’t natively support any of them. Therefore, unless your devices speak one of these protocols, Home Assistant isn’t likely to help you out much in this arena.

This means you’re either going to have to get e1.31 support into Home Assistant and then use something like xLights, or, you’re going to have to alter xLights (or some other package, or write your own software) to communicate directly with Home Assistant (or, alternately, your specific devices).

A very detailed Home Assistant automation might be able to make this work, but getting it to time to the music would be difficult depending on your media_player platforms.

All of that aside, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. The relays in these smart devices aren’t really made for that kind of activity and, therefore, I’m not sure they’d actually make it through a holiday season. You’re talking about, as a rough estimate, 10 on/off commands per minute, all night long, for the whole month of December. Assuming even only 4 hours of operation each night, that’s 72,000 commands over the course of the holiday. It’ll depend entirely on your devices, but, they aren’t likely rated for this many activations over their entire life time.

LEDs can do it because on/off isn’t handled by a relay. The mechanical nature of the relay in a smart plug means that it will wear out eventually.

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