Change LED color based on music?

SmartApps & Automations Automation Ideas
1

I have seen this come up a few times but no real solution yet using smarthings.

I have some color changing LED lights that would be nice if we could get to change based on music. The tuya app has this capability but I dont want my lights to have to go through tuya. I prefer the local control so I have the lights integrated with smarthings over zigbee instead of through tuya.

Would be nice if there was some automation where smartthings used the microphone in your phone to change the led light color.

Only way I can currently think of doing it is using HA and some app or utility in HA and send the commands back to smartthings to change colors. Likely very slow though.

2

We’ll need to know the brand and model of the bulbs as different models have different features available. :thinking:

BTW, you can have local control with some tuya devices if you use a matter over bridge device. The connection is local, and no custom code is needed, which is nice, but it doesn’t work for all devices or all features. This is becoming a more popular option, though, and is typically easier to set up and maintain, and, as you noted, likely faster than going through home assistant. Choice is good. :sunglasses:

3

The bulbs are from Zemismart so I think they are technically Tuya devices. But a smarthings zigbee driver exists (created by Mariano) that can control these devices directly from smartthings. I.e. Tuya hub or app is not required they just show up in smartthings as color changing bulbs.

I’ll have to look into matter over bridge with Tuya devices if they can run local. I prefer not to run Tuya at all if possible.

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4

Controlling the bulb from SmartThings is one thing, but something has to be able to hear the music to know what to tell the bulb to do.

Typically, this is done in one of two ways, neither of which is natively supported in SmartThings at the time of this posting.

Method A: The smart bulb or smart LED strip itself has a microphone, and it can hear nearby sound, including television programs or music playing in the room. This is one reason why the model number of the Smart bulbs Is important: not all smart bulbs have a built-in microphone. But even if they did, the SmartThings platform does not have an acoustic tracking feature, so you can’t use it within SmartThings anyway.

Method B: The app is written to access music being played on the phone itself and can use that for acoustic tracking. That means the lights themselves don’t have to have a microphone, but it also means you can only match them to music playing on that phone/tablet (or which has a special integration, typically directly to a smart television or sound bar).

The Tuya app and the hue app have this feature built in, but the SmartThings app does not. So again, you can’t get to it from SmartThings. You can use Mariano‘s driver to send commands to the bulbs, but you don’t have anything that can hear the music in order to know what commands to send.

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This is where a matter integration can be useful. If the manufacturer’s app for the device has a music mode, you can use that to create a “match the music“ scene. You’d still be able to control the Smart bulb in all the usual ways through SmartThings. If you wanted to automate something on the SmartThings side initiating the music mode in the app, that will depend on the exact models and apps being used, but again, often with matter, you’ll be able to turn on a proxy device that is visible to both platforms and then have that device coming on start your music scene in the manufacturer’s app.

But as far as doing it with SmartThings itself, at the time of this posting, you can certainly send commands to a light, but there isn’t any way natively to capture the acoustic input that you want to match to. :man_shrugging:t2:

I know people have done it in the past with Hue by doing one of those proxy set ups. I imagined you could do it with home Assistant in a similar fashion, but I do think matter might be easier.

If anybody else knows of a better way, hopefully they will post. :thinking::notes:

5

One think id like to say is that if you end up getting philip hue bulb and there hub and connect it with smartthings integration you get the exact thing your looking for. I believe it called music sync under the life tab.

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6

Very cool. :sunglasses:

But it looks like that’s only available if you have a Galaxy phone or tablet.

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