ESPHome on the Magic Home LED WiFi monochromatic controller

Posted on 13. December 2021

The Magic Home LED WiFi Monochromatic (1CH) Controller is a very cheap device for controlling a 1CH LED strip or wire which are often used for Christmas trees. Since it is using an esp8266 chipset, it can easily be flashed with an alternative firmware like ESPHome.

magic-home-led-controller

Since my pull request on GitHub got closed, you can find a short manual over here.

If you don't know how to flash ESPHome, please check out the official tutorial Getting Started with ESPHome first.

Flashing

After opening the case, you could see all the pins used for flashing:

GND to ground
V33 to 3.3V
TXD to RXD
RXD to TXD

magic-home-led-controller-board

During boot, you also need to connect the I00 (GPIO000) to GND.

ESPHome configuration

esphome:
  name: magic-home-led-dimmer
  platform: ESP8266
  board: esp01_1m
  
  ### insert wifi and additional config
  
light:
  - platform: monochromatic
    name: "Dimmer"
    output: pwm_1
    
output:
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    id: pwm_1
    pin: GPIO12

After successfully flashing the device, the ESPHome device should have already been found by your Home Assistant - if you have passed the correct WiFi settings of course.