Hi Home Assistant Community,
I wanted to share with you all a project that I’ve been working on recently. I refer to it as a Smart Fairy Light Dimmer, or just a Smart LED Dimmer.
I frequently see cheap battery-operated monochrome string lights on clearance at stores locally such as Walmart. I wanted to be able to take advantage of these deals, but I also wanted to be able to bring these lights into my home automation system to control them more easily and tie them into my automations. There is the QuinLED controller, but it was a little overkill for these types of cheap monochrome string lights.
Meet the Smart LED Dimmer, a fully open-source hardware project that allows for easy control of monochrome LED string lights!
It works great for controlling a variety of lights, with Wi-Fi and dimming support, it works great for my use case. My current iteration of this device supports two separate LED channels and has an onboard temperature and humidity sensor, and when I have a few of these deployed around the home, you can get a unified temperature reading of the whole house. I may want to add support for even more separate LED channels, which would be relatively cheap to add to the device in a future iteration.
There’s also a Video Demo on YouTube of the device.
If anyone is wondering more about this device, such as how I built it and the schematics, I have a blog post on my website with a schematic, PCB layout, parts used and the ESPHome code that runs the device.
Additionally, if you are interested in the project, but don’t want to print the PCB and solder it yourself, I do have a few units available at my Tindie Store.
I know that this might be a niche use case, but I’d be interested to see if anyone has any thoughts on the device, or any ideas for future iterations! This is one of my first custom PCB projects and I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out!