If you drop me a way to contact you I can maybe help… Mine has been working flawlessly on local tuya!
Having the Gemstone lights not integrate with Home Assistant or the software for the led light shows are what is making me lean more towards a DIY setup with wled
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Having mine installed early December. Not having these in a Home Assistant is a deal breaker for me but was over ruled by my wife.
Is it just the shared key that is needed? Can Gemstone provide it or is it necessary to do your own digging?
Now with the Google SDK, you can at least get basic functionality in HA.
- Turn on/off
- select colours
You’ll have to integrate Gemstone lights to google assistant for this to work.
I reached out to Gemstone owner and he said that the lights integrate with Alexa, and HA is a future project. Likely next year.
I am not holding my breath on that. I have been asking them to add a sunset/sunrise offset for a good 3 years and they keep saying it is coming in the next release. 3 years later still not there. I now use a smart plug and have HA turn on the smart plug on 15 minutes before sunset
Has anyone opened their gemstone controller box to see what’s inside? I’m wondering if i could just abandon the stock controller and replace it with a esp32/wled connected to the light string. The gemstone app sucks anyway.
I have been tempted to do that…
I have not. But yes getting it on WLED would be great.
I’ve opened up my box to take a look - it looks like the green board is for supplying power, and the brains for controlling the LED strips are the white box indicated by the SPI labels (+bt, wifi). So it should be a simple matter of replacing the white box with a WLED controller. I have not attempted it yet for fear of reprisal from my wife as we just had it installed last year. Maybe someone smarter than me can chime in?
New HA user, but I’ve been considering hacking my gemstones for some time, as I’ve done it with multiple other smart LED strings. I got access to a couple gemstone pucks at one point and confirmed they can be controlled with WLED via an ESP controller. They worked with the following settings:
Chipset: SK6812 RGBW (order: RGB) 12 volt. I’ll attach the little diagram I made myself of the orientation of their connectors.
My plan- haven’t tried it yet- is to someday just splice into the outgoing cable from the gemstone control box, and basically put a switch on the data line so I can flip back and forth as wanted between having it controlled by the gemstone box, or by an ESP WLED controller. From previous experience with other products you need to keep the gemstones on their native power supply (+), put the controller on it’s own 5V PS, give them both a common ground, and then just have the data input switch from one to the other with a physical toggle. This also keeps the gemstones supplied by their existing power injections. As I said I haven’t tried it, but in theory I don’t think there’s any reason that won’t work, and it avoids digging into the brains of the control box.
That looks promising. Since the Gemstone has both wifi and bluetooth, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an ESP32 in that white case that could potentially be re-flashed with new code. But I like your plan to make a new controller rather than hack the existing one, so the Gemstone can be restored if things go wrong.
Can you tell if the white unit is outputting data at 3.3v ?
Next time I get back up there I’ll bring my multimeter to confirm. I will let you know in a couple weeks.
Interested to see how this goes. Would love to be able to program my lights to certain animations for different holidays and when sports teams are playing…etc
there is a new Hub2 that is available. Anyone know if this has a local API?
The FCC report pages have some information:
- Manual
- Internal Pictures
The white connector shows 24v
There’s also holes for a pin header at the top (near the micro usb port) that could potentially be used for reprogramming the board
On the internal pictures you can see the chip used:
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This is great information!
In theory, using the usb port on top I could take a backup of the gemstone firmware and reflash with WLED using esptool or tasmotiser.
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Do let us know if you are successful in reflashing WLED!!
you might be able to get some clues from the Chinese knockoffs. I’m willing to bet you can use another controller for the Gemstone lights, but one that works with HA is another question:
specifically, the LED lights are USC2904. So anyone know of a controller that has this control and integrates into HA?
EDIT: From what I read, WLED can support UCS2904 with the SK6812 RGBW - RGB preference. WLED is natively supported in HA since its ESPHome based. I might be able to try this on a small Gemstone Light setup I have on my shed (about 18 pixels).
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This is interesting, I wasn’t even aware that there were knockoffs or that this might even be the manufacturer. I wonder how easy the controller would be to flash or what firmware the device comes with.
Have you spoken with the seller to see the price they are selling it for?