I’m working on a HA installation to monitor a server room at work. I’m using knowledge of my own HA installation at home to build the one at work. It’s still in the planning stage because I have to make sure I have compatible hardware that complies with our security standards. I would like to use LED light strips in our office space mostly for decoration but also to serve as a notification system (e.g., turn red if leak detected, turn blue if door is left open, etc.). One of our standards prevents me from using wifi-enabled equipment, so anything I use with networking has to be connected via ethernet.
Does anyone know of a way to control LED light strips using a wired Ethernet connection? I know Hue LED strips are an option, but they’re too expensive for this project. Does anyone know if a wired equivalent of the Flux LED controllers exists and is compatible with HA? (https://www.home-assistant.io/components/light.flux_led/). My search results yielded some devices on alibaba.com, but I’m not sure I’d want to use those.
Technically, you can control LED strips directly from a rPI GPIO. You could also do the same thing with an arduino board. All you need is data ports. Assuming the LED’s are smart led (they have a micro controller) other wise you have “dumb rgbs” this requires more complex systems because they are either on or off. I have not directly used the IO ports on the rPI for this, but it is the same concept.
The only thing you need to worry about is getting power to the LED’s some require 12 volts some run on 5 Volts. If you want some more information, I recommend looking up “xlights”. This is going to be far more information than you need right now, but it will give you a lot more in depth knowledge of powering RGB leds.
If you go the Arduino route (again I have not done this since I don’t have one) . There are libraries that you can install that will give you direct control.
Thank you. I will watch the video later when I’m not at work. I had actually ran across instructions for those, but I was hoping to have less programming involved. The LED light strip notifications is an added bonus, but not the primary goal, for HA at work. Unfortunately, the Pi solution is more complicated than I want. It also introduces another computer OS into the mix.
I have not looked at Zigbee controllers, but it is an option. I am planning to use Zigbee2MQTT (https://zigbee2mqtt.io) to interface with Xiaomi sensors without the Xiaomi Aqara Gateway hub. For my home HA installation, I have ordered the hardware, but it’s somewhere between China and Indiana at this point. I have the Aqara gateway hub at home now, and while I absolutely love its functionality, I don’t like its connections to servers in China, it’s difficult to load and reference custom sounds, and the interface has a lot of Chinese language writing and audio, making it difficult to use. My work HA proposal is waiting for successful setup of Zigbee2MQTT at home, but in the meantime, I’m putting together a cost list for my proposal.
The E1.31 is a little too pricey for my application, unfortunately. I’ll keep researching it though. Perhaps my initial search led me to the wrong stuff.
I could not think of the controller that a lot of people use outside of what I do. This was it! These seem to be fairly simple to setup from what I have seen. Do you have any experience with them? If so, I would be curious to get your impression.
So some in the community that I am in use these. (I was mistaken on the product) still good though. For the most part I use falcon controllers but this is similar.
ONly been playing on the surface with things like xlights the last few months, a couple of LED projects i use have implemented e1.31 as an additional comms protocol to control them which is promising
as for hardware componenets, i have not ventured there as i dont mind usin wifi and can build my own. there is a great little project ESPPixelStick that i will be attempting next
. http://forkineye.com/
I just wanted to follow up to my original thread. I did not find a wired solution, but as suggested by @anon34565116, Zigbee will likely be the route I go. If I use a USB Zigbee stick in the server, I don’t have to worry about WiFi and network access.
@anon34565116, I’m glad you responded. I had considered Z-Wave for the reasons you mentioned, but the sensors I was planning to use are Zigbee, and I want to keep the number of different protocols and ecosystems to a minimum. However, after doing some research on Z-Wave sensors, I found some Aeotec 6-in-1 sensors and leak sensors that would be quite nice for my project. There are also some nice LED strip light controllers that would fulfill my purpose.