The LED controller is the crucial connection made between a dumb strip of LEDs and the Smart home hub.
Which LED controller?
After deciding to DIY a Hue system myself, Gledopto, looked like the right brand as they produce all the required parts.
The Gledopto controller you get is dictated by the LED strip you want to control. From my other post going into the LED strips you will have an idea which one you require. There is also a price difference to consider.
The most advanced one is the RGBCCT controller which will have 6 pins. One for power, warm white, cool white and RGB. The simplest one has 4 pins.
1 or 2 ID LED Controller
So far it’s all been fairly straightforward to understand. The last piece of the controlling puzzle is wanting to know how you’ll manage the lights.
2ID Gledopto means that for when the bridge finds the controller, your LED strip will show as two devices, one colour and one white. The benefit to this is being able to customise an infinite amount of colour variations. The downside is you’re fragmenting the control aspect and have a bit more setting up for voice controlled devices. There are workarounds to this as you can combine the two IDs as one zone. It’s not perfect but I’m still figuring this out.
For example my hallway is lit by an RGB CCT strip, this has white LEDs and colour LEDs. As they are connected to a 2ID LED controller they show up as “Hallway colour” and “Hallway white”. My workaround for this is then to group these two “devices” on Alexa under the name “Hallway”. I can then ask Alexa to turn Hallway on or off and even change colour.
1ID will control both RGB and white. So when you give it a command over the Hue app or an Echo, it will make the colour the same across the two. There is less control over the colour but you have a much easier setup.
With my 2ID LED Controller I have the stairs going green for the Christmas foliage. But then when in the morning the lights turn on the white ID also turns on and I get a mint colour that I didn’t ask for. If you’re happy to mess about with routine programming then this shouldn’t bother you!
Power supply
I won’t go into the detailed amp calculations as I just made sure to significantly overspec my power input. You have to choose how many amps it will provide to the required length of LED strip you need. For a 7 metre 24V parallel run I knew 6 amps was more than enough so I just went for a 24 volt 6 amp set up. These then go into a standard kettle lead which will come to a 3 pin plug (for the UK).
Make sure to get one that has the relevant CE approvals. One of mine came without a fused plug and is classified as unsafe. This was from a different seller which I won’t recommend here.
Connect to the bridge
Once you have the LED strips connected to the LED controller you can turn on the power to the controller. Then access the bridge app whether it be Philips Hue, Amazon Alexa, Samsung smarter things etc.
You then use the bridge app to search for devices, it will then search for Zigbee enabled devices and hopefully the Gledopto controller will show up as a controllable device!
Where to buy the Gledopto LED Controller
This is in descending order of ease of purchase, speed and customer service. Price however goes cheaper!
Amazon
Gledopto Warm white / Cool white
eBay
Gledopto LED Controller -all of them