How to: smart outdoor Christmas dekoration with Meross Smart Plug Socket

From the time back when I lived with my parents (honestly that isn’t that long ago XD), I can still remember how my dad was setting up a manual control unit to turn the outdoor Christmas decoration on and off on a periodical basis. But I never thought about how I would deal with that topic, since I never had to set up outdoor Christmas decoration… Until now. Since I moved in the middle of this year, I have a balcony with large windows so I can see nearly everything up to the balcony’s handrail.

But honestly, a mechanical control unit is quite not appropriate for a “smart” household. Ok, I just cannot meld it with my personal standards. ;P So, first I searched for smart outdoor fairy lights but sadly I didn’t found something that meets my demands of being addable to the Wi-Fi and into the google home platform. Also, I thought it would be nice to have a more general control instance for the time after Christmas, so I can reuse is for something else.

Luckily, black Friday came along and featured me just the right deal (oh wounder) … so I decided for a mini project combining standard outdoor fairy lights with a smart plug socket. I ordered a 19,9 meters long Christmas decoration with 270 LEDs and the Meross WLan outdoor plug socket. Using a Meross device again comes with two benefits because first, I already know how the system structure and manufacturer app works (also I can assume the quality of the product) and second it is way easier to keep track of all the different devices in the network and keep everything working if they are from just a few different vendors. 

 

After a few days everything arrived and because, as I mentioned, this is only a mini project, setting the thing up can be done within half an hour. First, I installed the fairy lights around the handrail by simply wrapping them around and then securing them from moving away in a storm or so on with simple zip ties. To test if everything is still fine and I didn’t damage something I plugged them into the wall socket. 

Next up is the setup for the Meross plug socket. Powering an unconfigured Meross device up always brings it into paring mode, so you can connect to the Wi-Fi the device sends out and from there configure the connection into the right network. These steps are done through the Meross app on the smartphone, what also directly connects the device to the right profile. Also, as in my case, if you already have that manufacturer connected to the google home platform, the new device automatically gets added to your home and you only have to assign a room to it. 

 

After everything was connected, I took some additional configuration steps to finalize the set up. As the plug socket comes with two slots, it is possible to rename them, so you have three instances: controlling the whole device, controlling only the right slot, controlling only the left slot.

On the second slot, I attached my environmental sensor (I made a blogpost about it some time ago) from luftdaten.info. This brings another comfortable feature in, because the sensor hangs up from time to time and I must reboot it by disconnecting and reconnecting the power. Now, if I receive an e-mail about the sensor not working, I can fix this without even being home. 

 

 

 

 

Anyways, back to why I even started this project: smart controlling my outdoor Christmas decoration. The Meross app allows to set up routines for every device either for a specific time of the day or for a timespan. So I investigated the times I want my fairy lights to shine down on the street (what is as long as it is dark enough and also as the most people are up so they can see it. It’s not really worth having your Christmas decoration shining at 3am when nearly nobody sees it, it only consumes a lot of energy). For this regular on- and off-events I configured routines on the specific slot of the power socket to turn on and off. 

And that is already everything that needs to be done to have an automated, power saving and smart outdoor Christmas decoration.

How do you control your Christmas Decoration or other outside environment? Do you maybe use other solutions or found outside fairy lights that are directly smart controllable? Let me know. I am really interested to get in touch with some nerds, hackers and makers!

The somewhat smart advent wreath ( I know, I'm late to the game)

While everyone was preparing for this year’s Christmastime since weeks, I just felt energized to set stuff up when black Friday week started on amazon.

Because the lack of daylight always sets me in a bad mood, it wasn’t really a question that my advent wreath needs to be a little pimped up…. With LEDs! I still had enough stripes left from all my other smart-LED integrations. So what I had to look for was not much more than an adapter for the stripe that can a) pass through 12V 1,5A AC, as the LED-stripe takes as power input, and b) control the red, green and blue channels separately. Ok, maybe there is a part c). Because I can’t stand a LED-light in my flat not being smart controlled and I think of reusing the adapter when Christmastimes are over, it has to talk to the Wi-Fi at least and in best case is capable of being integrated with the google home platform. After a quick search, I decided for the “Wi-Fi RGB LED Controller” from smart magic home. Also, simply because I killed the last one I had in an experiment, I’ll need a 12V 2A AC power supply too.

As much as I like it to have light all around, I also like to have it safe and comfortable to use and that is why I decided to go with LED-Candles as well. Since then I only knew the one with a static plastic tip that has a flickering LED inside but during my research I found candles that have like a movable plastic flame on a wire that wiggles around if the candle is turned on, so I decided to give them a try. (Spoiler: I was sceptical when they arrived, but they actually do their job.) Sadly, I didn’t found LED-candles that can be integrated in a smart home control and the one with a remote only were controllable as a set and that’s not quite what you want to do an a advent wreath… So, I went with the “downside” of manual switches. But maybe, it’s not really a downside because turning on one more candle every Sunday is pretty much what an advent wreath is all about. 

And that already is everything I bought for this project (yes I did bought it all on black Friday sales and yes I was running out of time so it might could have been prepared better with more time). However, I went to the basement and found the advent wreath like I left him some years ago:

Yea…. So, in my first step I removed like everything and sorted by decoration elements I might want to reuse and by stuff that straight went to trash… like the bows for example.

After this, I had to cut the spikes that normally hold the candles in place because LED-candles usually have a plastic plate on the bottom and right underneath this plate, the battery gets inserted so, DON’T ever try to punch a spike like this through an LED-candle… just saying. :D Removing the spikes is quiet dangerous, so even it is necessary, I can’t recommend that and if you have to, take safety preparations like covering your ears and as you can see I covered the spike with a fabric so I can hold better onto it and if it slips through my fingers likely get caught before it can fly around. Still, it remains a dangerous thing! Because I was not able to remove the spikes restless, I smoothened them a little and covered them with these red fleece stars what also prevents the candles from sliding around. 

 

Next, I needed a basic platform to install my LED-stripe on. I used some cardboard and Christmas gift-wrap paper for that. The so created bottom plate for the cage I sticked then with some sticky tape into place. 

And now it was time to install the heart piece of the project: the LED-stripe and control! Normally, LED-stripes are not really flexible and almost every manufacturer advices to not bend them as I did. But I had enough extreme situations in other projects so I knew it could work if I’m a little careful.

And it did. With some patience needed, I glued them to the cardboard alongside the metal bars, then connected the controller instance to the stripe (please note: It is important to take care of the right direction. Most of these adapters are marked what wire needs to go where.) and glued the controller on the outside bottom edge of the advent wreath. Plug the power supply in aaand disco time! ;) 

 

All left to do now, is to download the app that can be used to control the LED-stripe adapter, set it up in your Wi-Fi and then do the standard integration stuff within the google home app (I have shown how this procedure works in older posts, so if you don’t know how to, just check out older posts with the IoT label). 

Then, I put some of the saved decoration stuff inside, not too much, not too little, so the LEDs can shine through nicely and installed the LED-candles with batteries on top. DA-DA!!! Finished is my somewhat-smart, LED safe and nerdy advent wreath. ^^

 

What do you think of it? Do you made some tech- or nerdlike Christmas decoration? It makes my living room an even more nice place to chill and relax. Good thing, we are all in home office at the moment! ;)