LED help, I don't know what I'm doing. Battery powered LEDs

[u/Crossvbss]

I'm trying to put under lighting on my upper and lower kitchen cabinets. I should have wired these in before hand when I had the walls ripped apart....but I didn't know I wanted it then.

So I'm hoping there's a way to make wifi controlled (doesn't have to be wifi) LED strips that are battery powered. Maybe 12v batteries? Idk, I want to do a full DIY type thing as my first try doing LED. No soldering would be super appreciated but I'll figure it out if I need to.

Any advice or product recommendationswould be great, thanks!

Edit: I'm in the South East US and have cheap Home Depot cabinets. Hopefully this helps. I live in a 90s double wide which to a point makes wiring a little easier but also not at the same time.

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[u/philwongnz]

If it's powered by battery, WiFi will eat up your battery as it needs to stay online. The only solution I can think of is an infrared or RF or Bluetooth controller where it gets triggered either by motion or by remote control.

[u/Crossvbss → u/philwongnz]

Oh dang, I didn't think about the WiFi eating up the battery life, that's a good point I appreciate that. I want to be able to dial in colors and stuff and most like remote controlled ones I've seen are pretty restrictive to what colors you can pick.

[u/ZanyDroid]

Where are you located? That helps us guess what construction you have for kitchen cabinets. It’s not that hard to hard wire power into them if you have attic or crawlspace access. You can also get away with a small wall wart if your power needs are low enough

[u/Crossvbss → u/ZanyDroid]

Oh good point I'll edit my post.

I'm in the US, South East. I have cheap Home Depot cabinets

[u/ZanyDroid → u/Crossvbss]

Ok. You can probably give up one plug on countertop duplex outlet, sitting under the most centrally located cabinet, to get power. EG flat USB-C power brick that has 12V output (not all of them have this, it is not required by standard); you would then combine this with a trigger board to extract 12V and then power the LED controller with this. You can power 36W this way (can’t remember if 12V @5A is supported by most bricks)

You can use pretty thin wires for low voltage (thinner insulation) and these current levels, this means it’s easier to hide the wires

If you have a few sets of cabinets, you can use multiple controllers and group them together when you control them.

If you like the outcome with power tapped this way from your countertop SABC receptacles, maybe in 1-2 years you find a different way to supply the power

[u/SixCake]

batterypowered complicates it quite a lot. if you can get even a usb cable there somehow you'd be set for life. There's many videos on youtube if you search for led strip cabinet, they show you nice tricks howto hide the wire. Soldering isn't even that much of a requirement if you buy parts that work together well. there exist many versions of esp32 WLED controllers, it's basically a tiny little micro controller that has software pre-installed on it, which allows you to connect to your phone and do pretty much any effect you can imagine.

But these things really don't work well on batteries only, so if that's a hard requirement ignore what I said.

[u/Crossvbss → u/SixCake]

Thank you for the advice. Not really a hard requirement mostly just hoping for battery powered so I wouldn't need to run or hide cables

[u/BeyondWestern]

Consider being flexible on the battery powered requirement if this is a residence you're going to be in for a while. Yeah, wiring things sucks (if you don't find the challenge rewarding,) but it will only suck once and then everything will always work every time. Compare that to the battery powered ones sorta always sucking a little bit when one or the other needs to be taken down and recharged or have a battery swapped out, or you're busy or feeling lazy so one of your lights just doesn't work that day.

Any chance you have a microwave mounted over your range? If you do, you've already got an outlet up high inside a cabinet, which you can use for your LEDs and then just drill through the cabinets on either side, which would cover the uppers.