“We recently took the plunge and got a bunch of HomeKit enabled light switches for our house. After that we got a string of the Hue Lightstrips for pretty multi-colored lights! After looking at the Hue strip, I thought that would be a cool project to build your own version. It also gave me an excuse to play with some NeoPixels which I’ve wanted to play with for a while now. :)
FADECANDY
I’ve had a couple of Raspberry Pis kicking around looking for a project, so I wanted to try and use that for this project.
After spending a bunch of hours cruising around the Adafruit website I came across the FadeCandy board and associated server software. This little board connects to a host via USB, and directly controls the NeoPixel strips. You run a simple server app on the host its connected to, which then allows you to make really simple calls to the server to control the lights. You can certainly control the lightstrips more directly, but having FadeCandy and the Open Pixel Control server in between makes talking to them a lot easier.
Since the Raspberry Pi can run the OPC server, and has USB to connect the FadeCandy to, it makes it a great little platform for this.
HOMEKIT SUPPORT WITH HOMEBRIDGE
Getting the lights connected to my HomeKit setup proved to be a lot easier than I feared it would be once I found my way to the Homebridge project. This project does all the heavy lifting of connecting to iOS and linking in to your Home you’ve set up in HomeKit. There’s already a homebridge-opc module which will integrate with an Open Pixel Control server running on the same host! All you have to do is create a simple config file for Homebridge which describes your lightstrip setup and you’re good to go! Starting Homebridge even prints out an ASCII based QR code you can scan with your phone to link it!”