Sometimes one project can lead to a hundred more. We celebrate Home Assistant's new release, the inclusion of the WLED integration and fall down the DIY project rabbit hole.

Plus some clever power solutions, cheap LED light strips, and a test drive of Project Off-Grid.

We recorded our first ever live stream to accompany this where we flash an ESP8266 board in seconds using WLED and esptool. This can be found on YouTube.

Links:

• Hass.io - Home Assistant — Hass.io turns your Raspberry Pi (or another device) into the ultimate home automation hub powered by Home Assistant. With Hass.io you can focus on integrating your devices and writing automations.
• Home Assistant Community Store — HACS gives you a powerful UI to handle downloads of custom needs.
• Omni 20c+ 100W USB-C/Wireless Charging — Portable Power Bank with USB Hub
• ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
• Home Assistant Smart LEDs using WLED and ESP8266 — A platinum level Home Assistant integration for the WLED project was released with version 0.120 on Nov 20th 2019. I'm going to walk you through flashing a D1 Mini (though the same steps apply for a NodeMCU too) using Linux. You can probably expect this process to take about 5-10 minutes.
• WLED: Control WS2812B RGB LEDs with an ESP8266 over WiFi! — A fast and feature-rich implementation of an ESP8266/ESP32 webserver to control NeoPixel (WS2812B, WS2811, SK6812, APA102) LEDs!
• LED strips - Google Sheets