I finish the lighting in my Lego room with the SMLight A1-SLWF-03 WLED controller

<p><strong>I finish the lighting in my Lego room with the SMLIGHT A1-SLWF-03 WLED controller</strong><br>Channel: <strong>Lars Klint</strong></p> <p>Hey, and we're back in the Lego room because in a recent video I put new lights everywhere here like in the cabinets and the nice neon light up behind me. All courtesy of Switchbot. But I didn't quite finish the job right because behind me in let's call it the server cabinet because that's the brain of the network is up there—the UDM-SSE and a switch and the AI key, etc. There's a few things there. That light there, as you see, that goes around the edge, it's kind of old like the other ones where some of the lights are going yellow. I can't do fancy lighting with them.</p> <p>So, in this video, we're going to finish the job with this WLED light strip and a WLED controller from SMLIGHT. And SMLIGHT has been a supporter of the channel for quite a while. I've done quite a few videos. My favorite probably being the one I did with Avi where we turned my light on from across the world using magic and triggery, I think, but also SMLIGHT stuff. This is an LED controller, WLED controller. It also has a microphone in it. It should go directly into Home Assistant and connect to this light strip here. And we're going to put that on there, get it all into Home Assistant, and then obviously fix the automation of opening the doors. Here I have a contact sensor there that does that. So that's the plan. But first, I think we got to get the old one off before we put the new one on.</p> <p>Okay, so the old lights are off. So, let me just introduce you to the A1-SLWF-03 LED controller. That's what it's called. SMLIGHT has product names like that. Just get used to it. This is a tiny, you can see it's very small controller. And you're powered with 5 to 24 volts. You plug in the ground, the signal, and the power for the WLED strip, which we'll do in just a second. And you're good to go. That's pretty much it. And then it connects via Wi-Fi to Home Assistant.</p> <p>So, inside of this, of course, is a tiny circuit board. And that actually brings me to the sponsor for this video. Yes, I am getting sponsors from the videos. And I am very excited about it because it does mean it allows me to do more things, right? It allows me to do better videos, do more videos. So yeah, I appreciate it. And the sponsor for this video is Next PCB printed circuit boards. That's literally what they do.</p> <p>So I had a couple of samples done. I have this. By the way, you can only order in bulk, right? I couldn't order one. So I've got six of these which are 12 to 24 volt converter circuit boards. So I got these off a website. I'll put the link down below where you can download your own circuit board files that others have made and you can get them printed. This is literally what Next PCB does. I also had these done because I thought they were funny. These are rulers. Yes. And it has a template almost on the back for all the different types of things you can put on them. Right. So, it doesn't do anything except being a ruler, but it's kind of a fun thing you can give out or whatever.</p> <p>But Next PCB that is what they specialize in. They do bulk for circuit boards and in particular they are very keen on Home Assistant devices. They are very big supporters of the whole Home Assistant ecosystem, which is why I thought this was a perfect match. So if you have an idea of say a sensor for Home Assistant that you want to create and you know something about how to design circuit boards, they can produce them for you and they're dirt cheap. Like I can't remember how much these were. I mean these were provided by Next PCB for this sort of demo. But if you were to buy these, they were not much and not as in some dollars like not much. But of course, you can order 100,000 of them if you want, if you really had something, a product that needs to go to market. So, thank you so much, Next PCB, for being a sponsor for this video because without these circuit boards, we don't have any devices to play with inside of Home Assistant, right?</p> <p>So, with that, I think we should install the SMLIGHT WLED controller and the light strip, get it powered up, hooked up, and then we'll see what shows up in Home Assistant.</p> <p>All right, the LED strip and the controller is installed. And as you can tell, it is on sound reactive thing. So, it reacts to sound. So yeah, I was going to play some music for you, but that's a really good way of getting demonetized on YouTube, so I'm not going to. But I have Home Assistant open here. So, it's actually really easy to get into Home Assistant. I put the controller on my IoT network. And if you want to know why that's a good idea to have all your IoT devices on its own separate network on your Wi-Fi or on your network, then go check out my video with Richard Campbell on why and how and why all the decisions that goes into that. We redid my whole network. That's a really good video. Highly recommend it.</p> <p>But I am here in Home Assistant. I'm on my light overview. So let me go and find the WLED controller under settings under integrations. And then right here at the very bottom, we have WLED way down here. And there are two devices. So I have currently I have my server cupboard WLED. So that's this one here. And we have the server rack light control, which is from the other video I did also on a WLED controller, but a PoE powered controller up in my server rack up in the office. And it's sort of a modular thing. Go check that video out as well. It's kind of a neat device also from SMLIGHT.</p> <p>I'm going to go into my server cupboard WLED and you can see it's all there. So, the preset is now sound reactive is what it's set to. But if I go in and I press on the little sort of light strip icon there, I get this whole sort of control for all of these colors. So, I'm going to change to blue. And then I'm actually going to change it to solid color, which is way up here there. So now we don't have any sound reacting anymore. So it's not so epileptic. I can of course increase the intensity here. And then there are all the effects.</p> <p>And there are a million effects. There are so many. I don't even know what half of them do, what they look like. But let's say we chose, I don't know, color twinkles. Do it like that. And it starts doing things like that. So, you get other colors, but there are so many effects that you can choose between. This is one of the cool things about SMLIGHT. There's so many options. It's also one of the confusing things. But it's all in here. I can choose all the colors, of course. I can change it to yellow if I wanted to. Oh, actually, I don't want color sprinkles anymore. Let's just change it back to solid. There we go. And blue I had before. Purple, beige, you know, whatever your color is. I like the blue one. That's fine.</p> <p>And then there's some other configuration settings in here. We can change the color palette of which you know the colors you can choose between and there's a bunch here as well. You can see very many many. Then there is the firmware so it's up to date. I updated the firmware. You can do that through Home Assistant as well which is nice. The intensity for the LEDs. So this is I think this is how bright they are. Is that right? I'm actually not sure what the intensity does. Let me know in the comments if you know. And then we have you can put a nightlight, you can restart, you can reverse the order of them, the speed of the animations and you can synchronize multiple WLEDs as well. I haven't played with that, but you can do that. IP address, etc. It is that simple. Literally plug it in, get it on your dedicated IoT network into Home Assistant with the IP and you have all the settings. That's all there is to it, right?</p> <p>All right, let's fix the automation with the doors so that we actually have a Home Assistant automation flow in this video as well. At this point, it might be a good idea to well consider subscribing to the channel. Yeah, it's a huge red button. It's just down below. It's not hard to find and it's free to press. But what it does is that it helps out the channel immensely. Yeah, it does. The higher a subscriber count I have, the more opportunities I get to create other videos for you, to show new products, to do new projects, to play with some farm stuff as well. Actually, I have a couple of really cool farm videos coming. So, stay tuned for those and subscribe so you don't miss them. Yeah. And if you want to support the channel in other ways, you can become a member. I do a bunch of behind the scenes videos on all the different projects that I do that are for members only. So, you can support the channel and get access to those behind the scenes videos and other things as well. Or just like the video, put a comment, let me know what you think.</p> <p>All right, let's look at Home Assistant because it's pretty simple. What we're going to do, I already have an automation here. I'm using Node Red in this case. And I know some of you goes, "Oh, why are you using Node Red? The in-built home automation Home Assistant automations are really good now." And I believe you. I just haven't got to switching back yet. I have so much stuff in Node Red that I'm still kind of sticking with it. So, here we are. But here is the server cabinet door. You can see I've just opened it and closed it. So, the sensor works. I know that. And that is just my Aqara contact sensor which is here. Server cupboard door sensing sensor opening. For some reason, the sensor is called opening even though it's closed as well. And it's on off. That's just how it is. Yeah, I know. And then if it is on, right, we turn the light on if we open it. But it's not the right light, is it? Because this is the old LED. So, we just got to change it over here to if I go server cupboard WLED. And then, of course, we got to turn that off as well. It is really that simple. There we go. And there. Oh, it's already got it. Yay. Excellent. Cool. And we deploy that.</p> <p>Now I just have a notification here as well so that this is sort of historic reasons but I get notification when the cupboard was opened because teenagers had a tendency to fiddle with things anyway. I probably don't need that anymore but I'll leave it there for the minute. But that's it. So actually I'll just show you here. I'll just change this as well just to show you that how easy it how good it looks. How easy it looks. How good it looks. Here is the server cupboard WLED on my dashboard and you get the same controls of course just in there. So that's just where that lives and I can turn it on and off which is nice. As you can see the server cupboard is open currently which is correct. So let's go down and see if it works.</p> <p>All right, moment of truth. Let's see if the automation works. So one, two, three. Look at that. I even put a little animation on it. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. So, and of course, if I close it and it's just the right one. I know I've had comments on this before why I didn't put the other sensor on this door, but anyway. Here we go. Otherwise, I couldn't show you that, right? We open it again. There you go. It works. A treat just like we want with Home Assistant. Simple but effective.</p> <p>So, thank you so much for watching. If you are interested in learning more about the SMLIGHT products, do check out the link in the description. SMLIGHT is a company in Ukraine that do all their research and development in Ukraine and then of course it's built and assembled in China. But they're really good products. I used a lot of them. They have not failed on me. I even automated a position sensor at my gate with an extra Zigbee coordinator or router I should say that's down there. But anyway, go check that video out as well. And of course, don't forget that check out Next PCB if you are interested in printed circuit boards because they have been so kind and supporting the video by sponsoring this particular video this time. And they do a lot of circuit boards for all the sensors that we use with Home Assistant and Home Automation. So, go and check them out as well.</p> <p>So, thank you for watching. Please put a comment down below of whatever else you want to know about these. It's a pretty simple setup, which is a whole idea. And as always, if you like the content, consider subscribing. That's the big red button. And other than that, I will see you in the next video. Thank you. Bye.</p>