OK, here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m already invested in the Philips Hue smart lighting system, so why not extend that to lighting to my case? In case you don’t know, Hue is a series of smart LED lights that let you control brightness and color remotely. There’s an smartphone app for them, Alexa integration so you can do voice commands, and various third party software programs. Actually the API is completely open so you can write your own. I’ve looked into a little bit and the commands are all JSON-based so it doesn’t look very hard.
Hue mostly consists of smart bulbs that fit in standard lighting fixtures but they sell light strips too. It’s the same basic technology used in most case lighting systems these days so it’s not a crazy idea. And if I set it up right I can make it so my case lighting is synchronized with the room lighting (of course you can still control lights individually if you want to). There is one serious problem, though: Being designed for room and accent lighting the Hue light strips are meant to plug into a standard outlet, not your PC power supply.
So I see two ways to make this word: The easy ghetto way and the more challenging proper way. The easy ghetto way is to just find a hole in your case you can run the power cord out of and plug the lights into an outlet separately. I don’t like the idea, but it certainly would work. But the rest of this post will mostly be about doing it the right way.
The Hue light strip setup basically looks like this:
AC->DC power brick --> DC power cord (very long) -> Controller -> cord to light strip (short) -> light strip
I took a look at the Hue light strip’s power brick and it says it puts out 24V DC. That’s already a problem because as we all know the highest voltage rail on a PC power supply is 12V. On the other hand the amperage is pretty low at 0.83A. I think the best thing to do here is buy a cheap DC->DC boost converter (they’re like $10 on Amazon) and up the 12V power supply rail to the 24V needed for the Hue controller.
The DC power cord is a fairly standard looking coax cable. The end the plugs into the power brick is removable, but unfortunately the controller end is permanently attached. As I mentioned in my diagram above it is very long, probably intended so that you can go from your outlet to where the actual lights will be installed. But it’s massive overkill for inside a case. So some surgery would be necessary here…chop the DC power cord and then wire that into the boost controller somehow. It should be possible but this is one area I don’t have a lot of experience with.
The cord between the controller and where the actual light strip begins is surprisingly short, but I don’t think that’s a huge problem. The controller itself is pretty small and also has adhesive backing so you can place it anywhere where there is room.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. I haven’t actually done something like this before so I would appreciate comments or suggestions. Thanks.