So I’ve had the old Conservatory removed and a new one put in place. Well I still refer to it as a conservatory, but with a solid roof and a dwarf wall, it’s more an extension than a conservatory.

Anyway, technicalities aside, I wanted to ensure the conservatory would fully integrate with my Home-Assistant setup, so here is a summary of the things I did:

1. Installed a LightWaveRF smart switch so I can control the lights from HA
2. Ran speaker cables through the wall before plastering to have a set of speakers that I connected to my Onkyo TX-NR656 AV
3. After laying the floor down, I decided not to use a standard scotia and instead fitted aluminum profiles with an LED strip.

The LightWaveRF switch was a no brainer to install and configure, so I’ll just skip straight to the next section

The Speaker cables were no issues either, and I connected them to a pair of Mission LX1 white speakers. They actually sound a lot better than I thought they would.

Mission LX1 Speakers

I connected them to the Zone 2 of my AV. First thing I noticed straight away is that although the AV has a Google Cast built-in feature, you cannot cast to both Main and Zone2 simultaneously, which is a shame. I connected a spare ChromeCast Audio to the AV and that did the trick.

Now for the pièce de résistance, the LED Strip scotia. I didn’t want a bog standard scotia or skirting boards, I was looking for something a bit more… fancy. I therefore bought some LED strip profiles and taped an LED strip to it. I decided for a WS2812B LED Strip type instead of 5050 so I could control each individual LED independently in order to have some nice effects. I used the code from Bruh Automation to get started and loaded the code on a WeMos D1 Mini Pro.

Here is an example of what can be achieved with such an LED Strip:

This actually took much longer than I thought, mainly because I had to run a pair of power cables through the profile and feed power to the LED strip every 4-5 meters or so to ensure it would stay bright enough.

I’m really pleased with the end result however:

And of course everything can be controlled from HA or my Google Home Mini 😎

I found this cheap smart WiFi switch on one of my favourite Chinese sites: the Sonoff Basic:

Sonoff Basic

And I thought: for a fiver, I’m not risking much, and it can supposedly be re-flashed with MQTT which I’ve grown found of recently (see Smart Christmas Baubles or Back-lit House Number if you want to know why).

Once received, I saw that indeed there was a header that could be used to flash the firmware. After a bit of search and from some of my readings on the Home-Assistant community site, I settled on the Tasmota firmware.

Now I have to say, at first the Tasmota Github website is quite daunting and complex, bit of a case of too much information kills information, but I eventually managed to get through it.

As I’m using Arduino IDE, I’ll trace the steps I had to follow in case someone else like me is a bit stuck.

First of all, I had to solder header pins on the Sonoff board to connect it to a PC and upload the new firmware. You’ll find everything you need to know in here

Then there were a few things that I had to do aside from downloading the code off Github. Now I have to plea guilty a bit as I simply downloaded the latest version and tried straight away. I say “guilty a bit” as it wasn’t obvious at first that there were more steps to follow when using Arduino IDE. So it’s worth following them else you may get the same error as I did: `MQTT_MAX_PACKET_SIZE is too small in libraries/PubSubClient/src/PubSubClient.h, increase it to at least 1000`

So here is the info: Arduino IDE

Once all that is done, flashing is a bit of a breeze (though I had to swap the RX and TX connectors on my 3.3V FTDI USB-to-Serial Programmer else it would fail to connect)

Once flashed, it was very easy to add it to Home-Assistant, especially when following info from the Github

Best of all is the control page when browsing to the Sonoff’s IP address:

Tasmota

I will definitely get more of these switches at this price.

My next project will be to add a DHT12 to it as it’s possible to wire one directly to the GPIO14 (on the header so easy) to add temperature and humidity data…

While I’m perfectly happy with the H801 LED Strip controller’s abilities, there were a few niggles that I didn’t like:

• The controller would always advertise as an access point, allowing “anyone” to connect as long as they knew the default SSID password (88888888)
• Communication is 1 way with no feedback
• The script I wrote to go through the colour spectrum was ran off the server and basically sending a command to the H801 over the WiFi network every 0.1 sec
• I had to create an on/off switch as well as 3 sliders to select the (RGB) LED colour

Knowing the H801 is based on the ESP8266 chip and programmable, I looked for a better solution and finally settled on corbanmailloux solution for the following reasons:

• The H801 is no longer an access point, making it more difficult to hack
• it’s MQTT “enabled” and offers 2 way communication
• It’s Home-Assistant compatible, and already includes support for RGB attributes via a colour picker and other effects
• It already has the function to loop through the colour spectrum; actually it has 2 of them at different speeds, plus the possibility to time colour transitions and a flash feature, for notifications for example

MQTT JSON Light on Home-Assistant

I used the code off the mqtt_esp8266_rgb folder. The only things I had to change in config.h were:

• LED colour pins to be compatible with the H801:

  #define CONFIG_PIN_RED 15
  #define CONFIG_PIN_GREEN 13
  #define CONFIG_PIN_BLUE 12

• change the WiFi settings and the MQTT settings

Because I use cloudmqtt, I also changed the MQTT port in the main `mqtt_esp8266_rgb.ino` file:

client.setServer(mqtt_server, 16306);

I followed the instructions on corbanmailloux git page to install Arduino and the relevant libraries, and I used the esptool from micropython to upload the firmware