Turning cheap RGB pond spots into Zigbee device

[felix63]

In my new garden, I have a pond. No pond is complete without remote controllable lights. Unfortunately, I didn't have much money left after redoing the garden. I settled for these lights.

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They came with a very standard looking IR Controller box and a 6V adapter. As IR control from my bench to the garden doesn't work I started to look for solutions to incorporate these lights in either my Z-Wave or Zigbee network.

ir control.jpg (12.13 KiB) Viewed 716 times

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Spoiler: show

Google showed me a lot of info about RGB strips but not on spots. But as the controllers looked exactly the same how difficult could it be. I found several options, both Z-wave and Zigbee. The Z-wave options (Qubino, Fibaro, Robb Smarrt) were all at least 50 euros. On AliExpress I found the Gledopto RGBW Controller for Zigbee with a discounted price of around 20 euros. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/zigbee- ... 4c4d72prAW.

Delivery was quick and installation quite easy. Packaging, build and instructions are surprisingly good.

The connection between the original IR receiver and the lights was made using standard USB plugs. So cutting up an old cable gave me a cable with a female USB plug on one end and four wires (black, white, green and red). Connecting it with a USB extension cable to the old controller and a Voltmeter told me that in my case black was +5V. The rest was trial and error. I had a lucky guess (Red wire for Red LEDs, Green for Green LEDs and White for Blue LEDs). And that was it. The Gledopto was recognized by my Hue app straight away. I can now control the pond spots with Domoticz, Hue and Alexa (and I increased my Nurd Score +10).