If there’s one thing we have plenty of options for these days, it’s smart light strips, although for the most part, you’re stuck with a standard two metre length strip plus extensions. Now, ZemiSmart has released something that’ll allow you to buy any dumb LED strip of your choice, at any length, and control it from your smart home Via Matter. How? Well, it’s all due to their new LED Strip Controller, which allows you to wire it up a standard non-smart LED strip, making it smart in the process.
This new controller allows you to connect basic RGB LED strips, or even ones capable of RBG and the white spectrum, typically referred to as RGBCW strips. In essence, you connect the separate wires from the strip to the ports on the controller, then connect a suitable power source (it’s not provided), and you can proceed to connect the controller to Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, SmartThings, or Google Home using the provided Matter QR code.
As it’s Matter enabled, this does mean that despite the controller being able to work with strips that can use cool to warm whites, Adaptive Lighting won’t work with the controller in Apple Home, due to Adaptive Lighting being an exclusive Apple HomeKit feature.
The controller also uses Matter over WiFi, so whilst you do need a Matter Controller for your preferred ecosystem, as it’s not using Thread, you don’t need to worry about having a Thread Border Router available.
LED controllers are not a new product, although they’re not as common as the pre-packed ones you can buy from companies like Hue, Aqara, and Nanoleaf, just to name a few. It is, however certainly one of the first Matter enabled controllers on the market.
Back to the power supply, and as LED strips are relatively low voltage devices, the Controller typically uses a transformer to bring the voltage down from 100~240V AC (depending on your location) to 12/24V DC. As each country has different legal and safety requirements for transformers, this is most likely the reason why one is not included, although they’re cheap enough to buy. The controller itself is currently selling on the company’s own website for just US$16.50 (plus shipping), but of course, you would still need to buy a light strip and the aforementioned transformer.
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