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One of the things that needed some re-thinking was the lighting in the house. (I almost wrote “new house” here, but it’s now the only house we own, it’s where we live. Therefore: “the house”.) When we bought it, there were fluorescent tubes against the beams running the length of the space, hidden behind ochre yellow boards. That wouldn’t do, so we removed all those. We made an inventory of which wall switch worked on which ceiling connection and where the cables led — something we also needed to keep in mind when the wall for the bedroom came in! And extra isolation was put against the ceiling, so all the original standard light pots were replaced with tubes with the wires coming out. Luckily we can screw light fixtures to the wooden beams, but it required some improvisation in a few cases.

One important part of the house where we lacked proper lighting was the kitchen. The main part of the kitchen is about 2m70 long, jutting out from the outer wall into the room. It also doesn’t help that the countertop is black, so there was very little usable light when cooking. Clearly, we needed something there. But I wanted something that could be bright when needed, but more dim and ‘warm’ as circumstances allowed — to have a bit of ‘mood lighting’. This is important, because the kitchen is a large part of the space, and the lighting there affects the other parts of the space as well.

I had discussed the possibility of putting in smart lighting with my builder. He had experience with a certain platform and he showed me a brochure of it. Nice stuff, but very expensive and it required a connection to some cloud instance and an account… That does not fit my requirements: everything has to stay within my house, on my own network. So I did some research and settled on Home Assistant, an open source project for smart home. It has some integrations itself, but there is also a large community that make integrations that can be hooked into it. So one evening I took a spare laptop and installed Home Assistant OS on it. I didn’t have anything concrete I wanted to automate at that exact moment, but someone had made an integration with the heatpump we use, and the whole Enphase solar panel array was automatically discovered(!) and added to Home Assistant. Now I have historical data of power consumption, which will help in balancing our power demands in the future.

But that didn’t fix my kitchen lighting issue. For that, I got a set with a 2m LED strip, an adapter and a Zigbee controller. I also got a LED driver that I could hook up directly to the mains to replace the adapter — there’s no power socket there. And I also ordered some profiles to put the LED strips in, so it would look a little nicer instead of the ‘raw’ LED strip.

First step was to get a 2m70 lath and paint it black to go with the countertops.

We screwed the included ‘profile holders’ to the lath and attached the two 1m pieces of profile together with tape and clicked those into the holders. We drilled a hole through the lath so we could bring the leads from the underside (with the LED strips) to above, where we’d install the controller and driver.

With the LED strip installed in the profile. You can clearly see the two colour LEDs and the resistors. The set came with connectors and all, no soldering required!

The cover for the profile is milky white, to hide all the electronics and diffuse the light a bit more.

The smaller white box is the Zigbee controller. On one end it has the three leads that are connected to the LED strip on the underside, the other side has a power connector. The power comes from the LED driver that’s above the controller: 230V AC goes in at the top (we got a nice power cord for it, covered in braided fabric) and at the other end out comes 24V DC to feed into the controller. This is going to be hooked up to the fixture connector in the ceiling.

So far it was a breeze, but hanging the lath level above the kitchen, suspended from the wooden beams in the sloping ceiling required a bit more work. We used steel washing lines with a rubber covering — easy to work with, but very sturdy.

Such bright light! This is the cool white light at maximum brightness.

The work surface is illuminated very brightly, so much better than trying to cut your veggies in the dark!

We got the official Home Assistant Zigbee USB stick (which you have to connect through a USB extension cord because Zigbee uses the same frequency as wifi, which means it’ll get too much interference if you keep it close to your hardware…) and the light was automatically discovered, along with its capabilities. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with my phone through Home Assistant.

But it soon became apparent that controlling it though the phone was a bit irksome. I was ready to buy one of those control panels when we remembered we still had a spare Ikea Tradfri 5-button controller lying around… Tradfri uses Zigbee as well, so connecting it to Home Assistant was a breeze. Scripting what needed to be done required a bit more work, but that’s all working now too. We have the button lying on the other countertop, ready for use. Super convenient. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with the Ikea button.

We’re very proud of the result, and it’s now a pleasure to cook at a well-lit area — and then turn the light to warm and dim it a bit when the cooking is done and we want a more cosy lighting.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.