My partner bought this insane looking lamp.
I asked the eccentric man who dropped it off how to replace the lights if they die. He said "take it to an electrician".
So I took it apart and it had extremely questionable internals.
The plan was to replace it with low-voltage (ELV) guts so that it was legal. I bought 5m of LED strip, and a USB-C power delivery breakout. I had a spare ESP32 board and 5V Pololu regulator on hand.
I quickly learnt that:
- The LED strip I bought is definitely not 2700k-3000k despite being labelled that way. It's more like 4000k.
- A lot of USB-C wall adapters don't support 12V.
- The USB C cable matters.
So I decided to:
- Order a 5V SK6812 addressable strip, which had a better chance of being a warm white
- Start with 20V from USB-C PD and step it down to 12V with a regulator for the LED strip.
After waiting for the stirp to arrive I mounted everything on proto board and this is what it looks like. I used BP connectors to join the LED strips up.
I drilled out two holes on the proto board to mount it to the frame. It's wonky because I didn't bother tightening the bolts much.
The lamp can be driven from the ESP32 and controlled like the other ESPHome devices in the house.
Original Mastodon posts: controller build and rainbow demo.