Creating a Simulated Window

Hardware
1

I’m currently moving into a new place, and it turns out the only window in my room will be on a door (which also happens to be north facing). Of course I want a little more natural light- but that got me wondering if I can make a fake window that has the feel of natural light.

I found this tunable white LED panel which seems like a potential victim for this project.

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It’s a little smaller than a normal window would be, but it is made to be a drop ceiling light, after all. I could put white electrical tape on the face of it to simulate some of the fancy bits you see on the glass of windows, build a little box around the sides to allow for clean mounting, and put a curtain in front of it. Somehow get it tied into Home Assistant, control the temperature with fluxer, make it dim based on the sun position (and possibly even make it change a little based on the weather!), and use a geofence to save power by turning it off when I’m not home.

The big question at hand is how to get it tied into Home Assistant. I’d probably have to ditch the built in controller/power supply, and then use a regular power supply and a controller that can connect to home assistant. I was thinking of using an H801, but you take a look at the panel’s built-in power solution, and I start to think the panel’s LED’s need more voltage than the H801 can handle.

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As you can see, the power solution says it has an output of 27-48 volts; enough to nuke a poor little H801. HOWEVER, if you look further, it reads “0-10v / PWM / RX / RF Dimming”. That’s got me thinking that the actual LED’s are only being fed at most 10 volts, which an H801 would gladly handle.

Seeing how easily accessible the individual positive, warm, and cool wires are for the panel, I might just go ahead and buy it, and take some measurements from the provided controller.

I guess I’m more or less just posting to see if anybody here has any familiarity with a panel like this, and to document my adventure in making a fake window.

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This controls the output by how many volts are sent. It tells the dimmer that controls the 27-48v line to either increase or decrease it’s output.

Technically you would only need to send between 0 and 10v to control the dimming module. The power to the leds would come from the 27-48v transformer.

THere are products like this already made but can be expensive, never the less it may give you ideas

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Ok that’s good to know. I wonder if the 27-48v is an actual LED driver supply, or if it’s just set at different voltages from the factory, seeing as the same exact panels are sold in several different power ratings.

I’m trying to figure out how to best go about “mimicking” the original controller, but I’m certain I’ll get more ideas once I have the panel in hand and I can take a look at what’s actually going on. The 10 volts instead of 12 is definitely challenging. If I wasn’t too concerned about breaking something, I’d see if it would accept 12 just to keep things simple.

I’ve ordered a 2x4 panel and two H801’s (figured I might as well have an extra on hand in case I blow one up, or I can use it for another project). The panel should get here next week, and the H801’s should get here in “less than 30 days” :roll_eyes: .
Somebody could really make a killing selling H801’s out of a US warehouse.

Edit: now that I think about it, the fact that the 10v is only for communication of sorts makes things real simple. There’s plenty of small 10v power supplies that should be ample for handling that, just not any capable of 60 watts or more. I could just run the H801 off a 10v power brick, connect its output to the dimmer in place of the built in RF control, and just let the panel run off its provided power supply.

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The 10v line is just a signal were talking milli amps. eg if you send 5v, the lights will be at 50% of the total output. If you use a 12v supply to send the signal, you can use a voltage divider to bring it down to 10v. I wouldn’t recommend over driving the signal line.

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Noted, so it seems like it’s pretty straight forward. Guess all I can do at this point is wait for parts to arrive!