While I’m perfectly happy with the H801 LED Strip controller’s abilities, there were a few niggles that I didn’t like:

• The controller would always advertise as an access point, allowing “anyone” to connect as long as they knew the default SSID password (88888888)
• Communication is 1 way with no feedback
• The script I wrote to go through the colour spectrum was ran off the server and basically sending a command to the H801 over the WiFi network every 0.1 sec
• I had to create an on/off switch as well as 3 sliders to select the (RGB) LED colour

Knowing the H801 is based on the ESP8266 chip and programmable, I looked for a better solution and finally settled on corbanmailloux solution for the following reasons:

• The H801 is no longer an access point, making it more difficult to hack
• it’s MQTT “enabled” and offers 2 way communication
• It’s Home-Assistant compatible, and already includes support for RGB attributes via a colour picker and other effects
• It already has the function to loop through the colour spectrum; actually it has 2 of them at different speeds, plus the possibility to time colour transitions and a flash feature, for notifications for example

MQTT JSON Light on Home-Assistant

I used the code off the mqtt_esp8266_rgb folder. The only things I had to change in config.h were:

• LED colour pins to be compatible with the H801:

  #define CONFIG_PIN_RED 15
  #define CONFIG_PIN_GREEN 13
  #define CONFIG_PIN_BLUE 12

• change the WiFi settings and the MQTT settings

Because I use cloudmqtt, I also changed the MQTT port in the main `mqtt_esp8266_rgb.ino` file:

client.setServer(mqtt_server, 16306);

I followed the instructions on corbanmailloux git page to install Arduino and the relevant libraries, and I used the esptool from micropython to upload the firmware