LED strips (for observatory lighting etc.)

[JamesF]

I know a few people are using these LED strips for lighting their observatories (myself included, obviously).  Mine have a wifi interface as well as an IR remote to control the brightness and colour of the strips and can also be controlled using an app on your phone.

It occurred to me this afternoon to connect to the wifi interface and have a poke about to see what was actually going on.  The LED strip actually advertises itself as a wifi access point so I connected the pc to that and it issued me with an IP address.  All this in an LED lighting strip!?  Security types are running for the hills already, I can tell...

Next I started a port scan, which revealed an open port 5577.  A search further led me to:

https://jpelectron.com/sample/Electronics/WiFi LED control/

and a few links from it:

https://gist.github.com/linuxkidd/63013efd73e198d035e6

https://github.com/vikstrous/zengge-lightcontrol

https://stephenradford.me/cheap-homekit-led-strips-lighting/

which look like they might be useful if you want to control a strip some other way.

It seems some versions of the controller also run a web server and allow more control over the networking so you can get it to join your wifi network rather than having to join the one it advertises, but personally I'd rather it keeps itself to itself from a security point of view.  The author of the first linked article writes that his strip attempts to connect back to a server in China, allegedly just for NTP (time synchronisation), but I see no reason to trust that.

James

[DaveS]

Agh, you're dooomed James, Doooomed I tell ye..... They're coming to get you 🤣