[Michael H Thiesen] had a couple of Elgato Key Lights in his home streaming setup. The only problem was that they would stop responding regularly, requiring a power cycle to get them going again. He never quite pinned down where the problem lay; instead, he set about replacing the light controllers wholesale to provide more reliable functionality.

In place of the original controllers, a pair of ESP32-C3 boards were substituted in. The original design simply had a Realtek controller chip wired into a PCA9635 LED controller, so the swap was as easy as plucking one out and wiring the new microcontroller in its place. The capable ESP32-C3 offers native Matter support, which enabled the new controllers to join [Michael’s] Apple Home setup natively. Running a firmware coded in Rust, the controllers offer power, brightness, and colour-temperature control right in Apple Home. As a bonus, there was no need to use Homebridge to get the lights hooked up to the smarthome setup anymore, eliminating a dependency and a possible source of occasional failures.

Design files are on Github for the curious. We’ve featured other great Elgato hacks before, too, like this nifty capture card firmware hack. If you’re tinkering with your own smarthome hacks, be sure to let us know on the tipsline.