I’ve had some fun making 3D-printed lightboxes and want to come up with a unified way to control them. I’m thinking that an ESPhome board of some sort might be the best bet.
I’m think it’d be nice to have a momentary control as an option to handle on/off. As in, a small button near the power input plug that allowed for toggling the light on/off, independent of any network control of it. Were it not for wanting local control ON the box itself it’d very likely be easier to just use a plug-in socket.
The boxes here wouldn’t need a tremendous number of LEDs on the strip, and I’m just looking for a single white color. I realize there are a ton of controllable LED options, and those would certainly be interesting to consider (chasing marquee patterns, etc) but they’re outside the immediate scope of what I’m considering.
The simpler, the better. With an internal control board that was as small as possible inside the lightbox would be ideal. Again, these are 12" sized boxes, not huge wall-sized displays. I realize ones of larger sizes would benefit from a larger, separate power supply. Ideally I’d use as simple a wall-wart power supply as possible, and use that to power both the ESPhome and the LED strip.
Anyone done something like this in a ready-to-go fashion? I’d love to find something already available.
As far as a ready-made hardware solution, I can’t necessarily help. However, what you’re describing could also be done using WLED (which I think is a better/cleaner option when all you’re doing is controlling LEDs). I know there are a lot of off-the-shelf WLED controllers (never used one), so there might be one with terminals for wiring up a switch/button in addition to an LED strip.
I’m an LED rooky but I think you just need a Mosfet and some buttons for this. Possibly some resistors. Assuming you don’t need to dim. Although maybe pwm for dimming can come from ESP. Not sure on that.
This is if you don’t mind DIYing it a little.
I think you should maybe calculate or measure the current draw of your LEDs and confirm your wall wart can do both lights + esp ok.
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As far as something more ready made, perhaps a Sonoff SV or even a L298N, as I understand you’d only need one power supply with both of them (L298N has a 5V out). L298N is overkill but it’s cheap and a pretty convenient package).
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Take my thoughts with a grain of salt as like I mentioned, LED rooky;)
Edit: Options above assume you don’t want addressable LEDs.
It hasn’t been my plan to use addressable LEDs for these, nor any dimming. They’re just lightboxes, on or off.
I could see using fancier schemes in the future, but recognize those are likely going to require more wattage.
That said, if there’s an all-in-one board that’ll do WLED for less than a meter of LEDs (possibly using a cob element for clean diffusion… I’d give it some consideration.
I suppose an alternative angle would be an actual 12v or 5vdc source that could itself be controlled.
An aim here is cutting down on power connection junk. I already have lights with USB power supply plugged into a socket controller (sengled, iirc?) and it’s clunky. Sticks out of the wall too much and tends to get improperly reconnected if someone needs the socket for cleaning or whatever.
The Plus 1 accepts being powered by 12vdc, but seems to indicate it wants to switch an AC load? Can the switching be done with the same 12vdc input? Their wiring diagrams don’t indicate that. Shelly Plus 1
I think the Sonoff SV is probably comparable to the Shelly Plus1? Probably cheaper. But Shelly is generally considered better quality kit. Nicer form factor too.
Probably both can be flashed with ESPHome which is something I’d be looking for…
You don’t have to flash Shelly with anything. I works in local network out of the box. Webserver like esphome has. Simple http requests to communicate with. Or mqtt, cloud or whatever…
It also works as wifi extender and BLE hub for other Shelly devices.
Right yeah I heard they are pretty good with thier own firmware.
How do they go with throwing on some extra sensors (motion / temp etc) if there are spare gpios broken out? Typically I feature bloat devices a bit;) I see people are doing things like this with the SV.
That’s the point with Shelly.
If you want to “hack” devices, I think you can go with Sonoff/Tuya crap as well.
Shelly has Addon connector for sensors but I never found it interesting. If I need Gpios, sensors, custom outputs etc, I prefer Wroom32 devboard with Esphome.
Shelly also has UNI, if you need devboard with up to 36V inputs/outputs.
One question that might not get as much consideration as it deserves, what kind of standby wattage are these devices drawing? I’m not particularly sensitive about it but figure that if I’m going to consider using a number of them it might be good to know what sort of long-term power requirements they’d likely bring. Tuya/Sonoff, etc, compared to Shelly? More or less a wash between them?
I bring this up after recently having to go through a bunch of our kid’s old toys to deal with batteries in various states of failure. One of which was a power-hungry on-wall light-up moon. It just chewed through batteries, and finding it now with 4 corroded AA cells reminds me to continue to give careful consideration about power management. Trading one devil for another…
That’s why we are here.
At default state they are cheap, uncertified, and working only through limited and unreliable chinese cloud. Not very appealing to me.
We kindly liberate them from the cloud, dig some free Gpios and they become a treasure.
For basic switch (power supply, 16A relay, wifi capable MCU), consumption is generally <1W. I doubt there is big difference between one brand and another. Hardware wise.
I think the certification side of things is worth understanding and considering. Both for safety and insurance implications. I would do your own thinking and research for your country on this.
In Australia (which I understand has pretty high electrical standards), if you use say a certified 12v wall plug power supply, then once you are at 12V, any attached devices don’t need to be certified (the Sonoff for example, or the Shelly as wired?). Well that’s the understanding I got from some of the AU sparkies on this forum. This is why devices plugged into a certified usb power supply don’t need certification.
I used to buy cheap 12V AU power supplies on Amazon / Ali Express, ignorant that they weren’t certified. Now I make sure they are.
Caveats on this again, I’m no SME on this topic… please do own due dilegence;)
For some devices it might be difficult to find those certificates, if they ever exist.
You can’t trust some print on the enclosure. For Tuya devices bought from AE it’s often impossible to find even manufacturer name.
Shelly (in Europe) is easy choice, every product have printed safety data sheet in the box, stating conformity for codes it has and link to website where you can find the complete certification.
Obviously, if the intention is to hack the device, certifications loose the validity. But can offer little bit peace of mind, knowing that they at least originally complied to some code.
For what it’s worth, I was looking at doing something similar but realized they’re close enough to each other that I could just power them all with long USB cords and a 10-port Anker USB charger plugged in to a single Shelly outlet for control.
Not trying to dissuade you at all - just tossing out an alternative option. In fact, I’d be very interested in anything you manage to come up with.
