IoT: Even more fucking Xmas Lights

Sabriena’s crippling Christmas habit is still well in swing - as we (Duncan and I) won’t be here tomorrow night and Halloween is always a bit of a disappointment at the best of times, she resolved to make up for it by breaking out the decorations a bit early this year… I’m reliably informed some parts of the internet call this “celebrating the ‘ber months”.

But because I have a crippling addiction of my own - namely attaching shit to Home Assistant - we can meet somewhere in the middle. After the scantest of research, I picked up a 4 pack of Arlec GridConnect smart plugs and used them to smartify all the rest of her non-smart Christmas shit.

Mercifully, someone else did the work on figuring out the data points, which I’ll mirror here for my own uses:

DP Value
1 ID (Switch)
18 Current
19 Power
20 Voltage

I’ve omitted the DPs I don’t care about, things like the countdown timer and so on.

Anyway, long story short we have a huge Christmas tree with four sets of “smart” lights on them, plus a bunch of lighted garland and other decorations. The old string lights have an annoying button configuration on them where they start out with a really obnoxious flash setting and you have to push the button each time to get the setting you want (I should see if I can fix that, but I don’t really want to be cracking mains-connected shit apart these days).

But using the scenes, I’m able to configure one-touch control of most of this stuff and it’s actually fairly useful. When it’s bed time, a single button push sends everything dark.

Cool.

Horsham, VIC, Australia fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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