TV LED light strip

I wanted custom lighting under the TV, so I got a Raspberry Pi Zero I had lying around and soldered a LED light strip to the GPIOs. Originally I built a flask Python server that ran on the Raspberry PI that had a custom UI to control the lighting from my phone. I decided that I wanted to be able to also control this through my smart speaker, Google Home. Unfortunately I struggled to find any sensible way to create a custom device that would work with Google Home. So after discovering Home Assistant (HA), which made it easier to add custom devices too, I decided to rewrite the code for my light strip to work with this.

I wrote a python script that would run on start-up. I choose to use MQTT as this seemed a reasonable communication method to choose and there was an MQTT app that could be installed on HA. Then to control the light with my smart speaker, I added the Google Home integration in HA and exposed the light device to it.