Rgb Led strip light controllers

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CokemonZ

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#262051 2-Jan-2020 10:56

I got some exterior rgb led strips for Christmas. They look amazing.

I now need a controller and am looking at these magic home units.

NZ$ 9.03 30%OFF | RGB RGBW RGB-WW-CW Wifi LED Controller DC12V 24V 16 Million Colors Music and Timer Wifi Control for RGB RGBW LED Strip.
https://a.aliexpress.com/rlLgFPKY

Anyone have any experience? I'm a bit shady about having another Chinese account but you know cheap cheap cheap.

michaelmurfy

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#2384093 2-Jan-2020 11:16

What kind of RGB strips? If they're the "Neopixel" variety you can control these with an ESP: https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED

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richms

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#2384150 2-Jan-2020 13:12

I have plenty of the magichome ones. They are reflashable if you open them up, but the stock firmware and accounts seem to work fine. The RGB output connector is one of those trashy ones that barely holds the pins, so hotglue is a good idea if it may have any movement at all. There are many revisions of them and the software on them. There seems to be no other the air updates for them.

So on my old ones they have a colour wheel, and a white which is just all channels on equally, newer ones have a colour temperature scale for the white which approximates the appearance of warm to cool white and does it quite well (RGB is still not suitable for lighting up things even with that)

The PWM frequency is quite low like all these ESP controlled devices, so you will have some annoyance when dimmed, but flicking thru full brightness colours its on solidly so no dramas with flicker there. I dont know if that can be solved with reflashing them.

The one for the pixels has 2 versions, a 5v and a 12-24v one. There are limited patterns in them and no ability to group pixels together or similar if you have a sequance of them around different things. Good for testing that things work and getting something happening under alexa control but very limited in what you can do. But again, very cheap. Might be reflashable to do more but as its cheaper to just get a wemos d1 mini, I have my pixels all being driven off those instead, plan to get wifi control of them but for now just power them up and have the code doing the lighting I want on it.

Richard rich.ms

howsitgoing

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#2384161 2-Jan-2020 13:31

I have used Aliexpress a little bit, it's pretty good. It's like the storefront to every factory in China.

CokemonZ

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#2384213 2-Jan-2020 14:23

richms:
I have plenty of the magichome ones. They are reflashable if you open them up, but the stock firmware and accounts seem to work fine. The RGB output connector is one of those trashy ones that barely holds the pins, so hotglue is a good idea if it may have any movement at all. There are many revisions of them and the software on them. There seems to be no other the air updates for them.

So on my old ones they have a colour wheel, and a white which is just all channels on equally, newer ones have a colour temperature scale for the white which approximates the appearance of warm to cool white and does it quite well (RGB is still not suitable for lighting up things even with that)

The PWM frequency is quite low like all these ESP controlled devices, so you will have some annoyance when dimmed, but flicking thru full brightness colours its on solidly so no dramas with flicker there. I dont know if that can be solved with reflashing them.

The one for the pixels has 2 versions, a 5v and a 12-24v one. There are limited patterns in them and no ability to group pixels together or similar if you have a sequance of them around different things. Good for testing that things work and getting something happening under alexa control but very limited in what you can do. But again, very cheap. Might be reflashable to do more but as its cheaper to just get a wemos d1 mini, I have my pixels all being driven off those instead, plan to get wifi control of them but for now just power them up and have the code doing the lighting I want on it.

Perfect answer - thanks!

They sound like a good starting point. Do you have wifi ones? What's the app and google home experience like?

richms

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#2384245 2-Jan-2020 15:07

App is pretty average. You can make sequances for colours in it, which are custom one, and it has the basic 3 colour and 7 colour fades/steps as inbuilt ones as well as strobing in various colours.

It doesn't seem to save the list of devices so every time you open it, first it shows the ones it finds on the lan, and then adds in the ones from the cloud account its logged in with. Like most of these apps you can only log in on one device at a time.

Cloud control has been almost faultless on it which is more than I can say for the sonoff ewelink cloud recently.

Google has basic control - turn on led sign, turn off led sign, set led sign to purple, dim led sign 20%, dim led sign to 20% (those are different commands) - there is no way to set the blinking/fading sequences from google that I have found.

One thing tho, do not get the RGBW or RGBCCT controllers unless you have the LEDs to connect to the white channel(s) - there is no way in the app to disable those, and if you dont have anything on them, just on the RGB lines when you set it to white, you get nothing out of the others. I got several thinkint that it would be useful to have incase I change the strips later and it cant do white on those things with the strips I have connected.

Richard rich.ms

CokemonZ

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#2384248 2-Jan-2020 15:20

Thanks for the heads up about the RGBW units - I'd had the same thought as you.

Annoying about only one app being logged in, but can get around that with google home I guess.

Placing the order now 👍

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richms

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#2384249 2-Jan-2020 15:22

You can make more accounts and share it, and it seems that on the lan things can still be controlled when not logged in... Sometimes..

Edit:

also if your lan is larger than a /24 size, you will have problems setting them up if the phone and IP address that the controller gets assigned do not have the first 3 octets of the IP address the same, it doesnt seem to be subnet aware when searching, just assumes that everyone has a /24 on their router.

Richard rich.ms