WTH - Why addressable led strips are not fully supported?

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

Led strips are great. You can design cool effects and individually set each segment a color or style, in the default app. In home assistant, I can only set an on / off and if I change the color, it set the whole strip to the selected color.
Can strips be more customizable from within HA ?

2

What controller are you using to control the LEDs? If it’s one that uses WLED, there is an integration for it.

3

I was more referencing any cheap led strips that you can find in stores.

4

So… why aren’t random undocumented cheap LED strips supported?!

Can you give an example?

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5

Let’s take for example tuya based strips, as they are usually what we find in stores.
Tuya isn’t some random brand, a lot of people use it, it’s documented and make a lot of “random” strips available in a known format.
The Tuya integration doesn’t give any capabilities for scenes or per section addressability.
There is a way in local Tuya integration to set the scene and get an entity per section of the strip, but it’s horrendous to use and setup.

6

Is this an issue with Govee integration too? Or is it possible to trigger effects, etc. through the local API functionality?

7

I’m not sure how the Home Assistant Govee integration works but I can trigger scenes using the Hubitat integration which definitely uses the API as well as triggering scenes using Postman directly to the API.

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8

Tuya was (is) not opensource friendly. I had several devices from tuya in the past but to use them you need to register a developer account and then the key is valid for 3 month. So in 3 month if you have bought new device you need to reissue key again.

Checked tuya integration page and looks like it is not an issue anymore Tuya - Home Assistant.

You can try using Tuya Convert - Tasmota to have tasmota firmware instead and then have full control.

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9

Kind of mincing words but this isn’t HAs problem to solve HA can support exactly what the integration supports.

In your case you’re fighting Tuya and what it (doesn’t) allow. Thays not HAs fault.

Ive got some govee lamps and they also don’t publish the effects (how you get to advanced effects) accessible except where a few. Industrious users have reverse engineered the protocol.

If instead you had lights that were driven by WLED they’d work probably exactly how you expect even esp32 supports answering wled calls now.

HA cant be expected to randomly support every whatever with no information about it (Tuya is not a protocol it’s a walled garden)

So in this case WTH Tuya, govee and whatever random vendor for not opening access or using industry standard protocols. (btw they’ll tell you to go pound sand because ultimately they WANT you in thier walled garden.)

So maybe find lamps that use things like WLED and the kick off a rocking Christmas light show from the HA ashboard

3 Likes
10

WLED is the way. Sure it takes a bit more effort and planning than what is originally described by OP, but the barrier to entry is low compared to many ‘advanced’ things and what it opens up with LED is truly mindblowing. You will have a much easier road ahead if you diverge now and start exploring WLED. The effort will be rewarded!

There are lots of YouTube tutorials out there but this channel is the one that got me going and provided a clear pathway to get started.

2 Likes
11

I’ve searched about wled integration and I get what you say about the features that it has.
However, it doesn’t have the possibility to have individually addressable parts of the strip.
Currently, the light entity only support color, brightness and scene.

12

Yes it does, you have to set it up from the WLED side. You can also avoid setting it up via the WLED side and just connect it through MQTT and adjust the leds that way. There is a ton of flexibility with WLED.

The biggest issue this WTH has is most APIs for strip lights do not offer functions that allow you to call out individual LEDs. That will always be the limiting factor here.

IIRC WLED and ESPhome are the only 2 strips that offer this via an API. All the rest only allow you to change effects with a series of parameters.

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13

WLED has ability to setup segments that can each be programmed separately. Segments can even be every 3rd LED, 4th LED etc. They don’t have to be consecutive. I don’t know if Segments can be created in HA though.

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14

Segments are automatically pulled into HA from the WLED integration. This is what I meant when I said:

I was referring to segments, I avoided the term because Kwik is unfamiliar with WLED.