Dove into hacking an LED curtain and discovered that despite lacking visible daisy chaining, it's hackable! With LEDs pre-programmed for their position, it can receive collective data and recognize individual signals. Flashed WLED firmware onto an ESP32 and, voila, it lit up beautifully, even supporting 2D grid patterns for cool visuals. The key components: a BLE SoC, buffer IC for level shifting, and a curious way of LED data handling that's cleverly efficient.
In a fun-filled deep dive into a Philip's Hue Color light bulb, I disassembled, analyzed, and ultimately restored it to working order. Over the course of the hack, I dismantled the bulb’s interior, from the aluminum PCB to the tiny ICs on the logic board, gave a detailed breakdown of their functions and even reverse engineered the signals controlling the colors. Most of the colors worked out pretty well, except for the dodgy yellow. Also, I tried running the hacked bulb setup with my old Moonlamp project. It was a great challenge and an exciting journey!