LED Strips
Intro
Last time I was at my friend’s house, we installed Mysa smart thermostats. I wrote about that in my previous post. My friend and his wife liked the smart features so much, they wanted to upgrade more of their devices to smart devices. The next item on their list was the under cabinet LED strip in the kitchen. In this post, we will go over the installation of RGB LED strips and a matching LED controller with smart features.
At my friend’s house, 12V LED strips were installed beneath the kitchen cabinets, powered by a 120V AC to 12V DC transformer. We sought RGB LEDs compatible with this setup. Many smart LED options proved impractical due to power constraints or cumbersome controllers. Opting to source LED strips and controllers separately offered flexibility, simplifying installation.
LED Strips
[!NOTE]
The Chip On Board (COB) is a technique for mounting bare ICs on the circuit board directly. Read more about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_on_board and https://siliconlightworks.com/resoures/what-are-cob-leds
These LEDs have a much higher density than the previous Surface Mount Device (SMD) LEDs. They are also multicolor with four wires, one for V+ and one for each color (red, green, blue).
LED Controller
BTF-LIGHTING C03W RGB SMD FCOB 4 PIN LED Strip 2.4 GHz WiFi Group Controller
This controller works with 12V power, has WiFi and works with Tuya Smart App. We can tun the LED strip on or off, change colors, brightness and connect it to Alexa/Google Home using the Tuya Smart App.
On one side we have 12V input with V+ and V- ports. On the other side we have output for LED strips with V+, R, G, B.
Installation
Before doing a full installation, we tested the setup using a 12V power adapter from an old external hard drive case. Put the 12V power adapter cable in the input jack on the LED controller. Connect it to Tuya Smart App. Connect it to Alexa using the app. Switch on the LED output and change the color to white.
To connect and test the LED strip with LED controlled, cut off the black connector from the LED strip cable. Then strip the cables about half an inch. Connect the Black side to V+ and then individually connect Red to R, Green to G and Blue to B to test the color connections. If all the colors light up, we are good to go.
The installation under the cabinet was similar. For the 12V input, use a multimeter to verify the right wire before connecting to the LED controller. Then wire according to the diagram below.
[!CAUTION]
Most places do not allow you to do electric work without proper certifications. Get a certified electrician to do any wiring work
Results
We had to drill a hole to mount the LED controller on the side of the cabinet behind the fridge. The connection to WiFi is still really good. Double sided tape worked well. The LED strip has glue, so only needed to peel and stick under the cabinet. Installation took about 20 minutes, moving the fridge out of the way was most of the work. The Alexa integration worked well and so did the scenes. We created a few routines on Alexa. The lighting looks much better than the previous. My friend and his wife love changing the colors. They created several scenes later for coffee time, cooking, different games, etc.
Thank you for reading. I will post more content shortly.