Hello.
Pretty new to the world of ST and had a good search on the forums but not found a definitive answer.
My use case is I have a built in wardrobe/cupboard in the bedroom which spans the while length of the room and has 3 separate doors. I’ve wanted to get some lighting in there via nicely hidden RGB strips (or just white will do) and thought ST might provide the ability to turn the LEDs on when the doors open using a door or multipurpose sensor. To take it a step further i was curious to know if ST can address only specific LEDs (maybe through IFTTT and scenes/themes) so that only the LEDs in the section of wardrobe come on when that door to access that area is opened? I presume having one strip and doing it this way would be less messy than three separate strips.
Has anyone got a recommended zigbee (or ST compatible) RGB controller or kit? And preferably one where i can control individual LEDs or groups of LEDs?
The only smart LED strip I know that has addressable zones is the one from LIFX. This is a Wi-Fi strip. It’s a new product and to be honest I’m not sure if there’s a smartthings integration yet. (There is an official integration with the bulbs, I just don’t know about the strips.)
The other alternative, of course, is to use three separate plug in strips, One for each section of the wardrobe.
The Alexa App now serves as a nice little WiFi bridge for ST. This is good because things that are WiFi and branded to work with Alexa are now easily accessible in ST. There’s a lot of cheap LED WiFi controllers out there!
You could also:
Get a couple of dual channel Z-Wave relays and cheap LED controller for each zone that remembers its status after power loss.
All you would need is 1 power source to feed the relay boxes in parallel. Feed the LED controllers from the relays. Use thermostat wire to feed each zone. Use a LED connectors to convert the therm wire.
There are multiple Z-Wave and zigbee controllers that will do “dumb” analog LEDs along with some WiFi solutions that directly integrate depending on how DIY you want (ST_Anything for example). Programmable LEDs are not only much harder but much much more expensive.
I’m personally using both ST_Anything (diy/WiFi) and a Z-Wave RGBGenie RGBW controller for analog LEDs that cost $12 for a 15 foot roll.
If you can live without turning individual ones on and off and turning on strips you can get it done DIY for under $30. Non DIY closer to $50 - $60.
If you’re technically inclined you can use micro-controller development boards like arduino, photon, etc. to control addressable led strips. Here’s a project that uses a particle photon to create some cool theater lighting effects:
Thanks all for your replies. Trying to avoid Wifi and i don’t like the thought of everything not working if my internet connection goes down. Going to investigate the arduino route for sure. Thanks again.
Sorry guys, I through Davids post was a few days old and not just over a year!
Hi David,
You say you worry about the internet going down… Am sure you know as you have been around for over a year that there are many devices that do not have Device Handlers that run locally. As you setup grows (perhaps you do not have that aim) you will struggle to find things that will run locally. Saying that I took mine off my normal ISP years ago and have it hooked up to a decent LTE router with dual sim fallover as well as fallover to my main ISP etc. Not cheap to buy the router but very cheap each month for the 4G sim, considering. Not had a single outage in over 3 or 4 years now. If it is important to you then I would defo recommend taking this route if you stick with ST. Have your main ISP connected and the LTE as fallover if you prefer. Avoid brands like Asus etc. I would recommend the Teltonika LTE routers, I upgraded last year to the RUTX11, great bit of kit, even cheaper than some of the better known ones and out performs them by miles.
Apologies, a little off topic but you did menton your concern of your internet going down and as there are so many devices that will not run locally this is probably your safest bet to keep yourself live all the time.
If anyone is still looking to do this I think I have it figured out within the ST_Anything framework. Will cost you a $10 ESP32 and your light strip/power supply of choice but should fully integrate into SmartThings. Should even be able to do multiple different strips with one controller although I haven’t fully tested that yet.
See the link above. ST_Anything is a project that uses a esp32 or esp8266 to bring in regular wired devices to SmartThings. I have not done individual ranges of LED control though, juat a entire strip. With that said one ESP32 should be able to control multiple strips at once.
