New Smart (?) Conservatory

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

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 😎