My kitchen has some pretty bright spotlights in it, but they’re only in use when you’re working in there – once you turn them off and leave, the room can be very dark and its kind of depressing when you walk past it. I wanted to add some warmth by putting some soft under cabinet lighting. 

I started in the Amazon end of summer sale by picking up the cheapest RGB strip lights on offer. I was a little worried that some of the reviews mentioned that the power pack was a a bit suspect and had exploded for a few people, so I decided to use an old generic laptop adapter I had lying around. I measured the power draw of the full 10m of lights to make sure it was powerful enough for the job.

The lights I bought came with an IR remote to control the brightness and colour, but I wanted to be able to control them though Home Assistant. I connected them up to a Shelly RGBW2 controller.

Because of the layout of the cupboards, I needed to fit the lights in several strips, so I bought some strip connectors from eBay, as well as an RGB strip extension cable, that I used to connect the sections together in series.  

Getting all of the LED strips stuck to the undersides of the cabinets and all the wires connected up was might more fiddly than I expected, and took quite a while, but with it all tidied away, I’m really pleased with the end result.

Timelapse

You can watch the instal process on my TikTok or YouTube channel.