Welcome —finally— to my guide on how to control RGB LED lights from your smartphone or web browser by making use of the DMX protocol.

Some background

First of all, a bit of background history on how this all came to be. I started this project way back in February 2015 when we first installed RGB LED strips in my room. In order to power them, we got a regular 12V power supply, along with a DMX decoder to control the full RGB color scale.

As it turns out, the DMX decoder included a wireless remote that’s supposed to help you change the color in display with an iPod-like wheel, along with the brightness and more. However, this remote just plain sucks; the “color wheel” is awful at best, and there’s no easy way to come back to the color combinations you’ve found to be the most comfortable.

There are countless other ways to solve this problem, but the aim of this DIY project was to figure out a new and better way to control the LED lights, while keeping the already present DMX decoder. To achieve our goal, I settled on just building a mobile-ready web interface and connect it to an Arduino board.

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