How to set up Tasmota to control LED strips individually on a single H801 controller

The H801 LED controller is a versatile, Wi-Fi enabled LED controller based on ESP chips. It can be easily flashed with Tasmota and configured to control multi-channel colored LED strips or multiple single-color LED strips.

This post explains how I configured the Tasmota firmware to control 2 separate LED strips independently. According to this excellent write up at tinkerman each channel is driven by a 60V N-Channel mosfet rated for 35A or 106W maximum power dissipation.

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Note: Be sure to confirm your Length of LED strip does not exceed the single channel maximum current for H801 to avoid burning out the mosfets.

Common Tasmota Settings for LED strips

Reading the Tosmata commands documentation, I found some interesting settings that allowed me to setup the H801 wifi LED controller to control multiple single colour led strips.

fade	enable/disable fading
speed	Transition speed when turning off, does not work reliably for turning on. works with power off command. power off uses the specified speed value, however, power on uses a shorter fade interval. I am not sure what vlaue it is using, though it appears to be relative to speed, but shorter. The firmware maintains a dimmer variable which stores its value even when the device is turned off.
wakeup	turn on and fade to current dimmer value
WakeupDuration	transition duration in seconds (like speed but for turning on)
Sleep	sleeps controller, which causes choppyness in led fading, set to 0 (off)

Note: that Speed is not referring to wall clock time. If your controller sleeps for 250ms each cycle, then a 1s sleep setting will actually result in a “speed” of 4 seconds.

So the firmware does support smooth fading. Now to find a way to integrate it into Home Assistant.

The Tasmota Commands Documentation is a very interesting (but long) read. I encourage everyone to check it out and take the time to go through it. I ended up finding much easier ways to accomplish things because they had already implemented what I needed.

Tasmota Template for H801 Wifi LED controller

{"NAME":"H801_Custom","GPIO":[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,41,0,0,0,0],"FLAG":0,"BASE":20}

The following options allow you to split the various colour channel outputs into individually controlled LED channels. Rather than having a unified interface for selecting RGBW colours, this allows you to control upto 5 LEDs strips (one for each “Colour” channel on the controller). See image below for Tasmota interface.

H801 GPIO pin mapping and Tasmota name

See the pin mapping below:

Colour Channel	ESP8266 GPIO Pin name	Tasmota name
R	GPIO 15	PWM1
G	GPIO 13	PWM2
B	GPIO 12	PWM3
W1	GPIO 14	PWM4
W2	GPIO 04	PWM5

Home Assistant Light Configuration

Integrating this type of Tasmota setup into home Assistant was a little tricky. I pasted my YAML config below. Note how the command_topic references the individual channels denoted by cmnd/son_bedroom_led/PowerN where N in the number 1-4. Similarly, state is reported back on stat/son_bedroom_led/RESULT for all channels and the correct channel value must be selected using state_value_template.

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light:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: Bedroom Led
    state_topic: "stat/son_bedroom_led/RESULT"
    command_topic: "cmnd/son_bedroom_led/Power3"
    state_value_template: "{{ value_json.POWER3 }}"
    brightness_state_topic: "stat/son_bedroom_led/RESULT"
    brightness_command_topic: "cmnd/son_bedroom_led/Channel3"
    brightness_value_template: "{{ value_json.Channel3 }}"
    brightness_scale: 100
    optimistic: false
    qos: 1
  - platform: mqtt
    name: Headboard Led
    state_topic: "stat/son_bedroom_led/RESULT"
    command_topic: "cmnd/son_bedroom_led/Power2"
    state_value_template: "{{ value_json.POWER2 }}"
    brightness_state_topic: "stat/son_bedroom_led/RESULT"
    brightness_command_topic: "cmnd/son_bedroom_led/Channel2"
    brightness_value_template: "{{ value_json.Channel2 }}"
    brightness_scale: 100
    optimistic: false
    qos: 1

Conclusion

This post explained how to separate the LED channels on H801 controllers using a Tasmota template. This allows us to control multiple single colour LED strips independently using the same controller. I find this useful when there are multiple LED strips connected to the same power supply and can be controller by the same Wifi controller. Check out my post on home cinema lighting automations for examples.

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