Hi,
i just received my new FLS-M. After connecting my COB WS2811 LED strip and confugring it, i added the 2 configured lamps to deconz and now they are controllable with diyHue. Great, smooth and easy. They’re connected via ZigBee to my ConBee2.
But it is still ver disappointing and not clear from the marketing material, that the defined lights only work as single color strips. The only reason to use ARGB strips is, that you can split it in multiple lamps.
The best thing about ARGB imho is, that you can make nice gradients or even better: animations.
To Test the strip beforehand, i made a diylight with an ESP8266. It worked great and as expected. Since i dont want lights to clutter up my wifi, i only want to use my existing ZigBee network.
Are there any plans, to emulate these strips as Hue Gradient strips?
Hi @Schalmeier,
I am the firmware developer of the FLS-M.
Support for addressable LED strips was a relatively late addition to the development of the FLS-M. As a result, in the initial release firmware, the sub-segments of an addressable LED strip are handled as multiple “dumb” LED strips with opacity.
However, more features are planned that will bring “life” to these sub-segments. We are currently discussing how to integrate effects and animations, as we can’t simply replicate the Philips Hue implementation for obvious reasons. Additionally, we want to ensure that users don’t need to install yet another app, so we are looking for a way to seamlessly integrate this functionality into all Smart Home Supervisors.
Since the FLS-M is primarily a Matter product, each new firmware release requires re-certification, which means this will take some time.
Stay tuned—more features are on the way!
Best regards,
Eric
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Hi @Haerteleric,
Thanks for this answer. Since i now intergrated the FLS-M into my furniture it is not going anywhere. In total i installed 6m of WS2811 strip in it. 5m of it are on the top of the very long cabinett wall. For now, i split this 5m part into 3 lights. This gets the job done in some way 
Also i need to say, another very usefull part of ARGB strips in this case is simply, that you can make multiple lights with one. Sorry for beeing so harsh. One long strip (with wires inbetween), 4 lights. Just great.
I’m sure you now of diyHue Lights. They managed to split any length of LED strip into the three parts a Hue Gradient strip would require for emulation.
My only caviat is, that updating the firmware of the FLS-M in the future could be hassle, since it is ontop of my cabinett. 
Thanks for your great work. Keep it coming!
Yes, I’m aware of those open-source effect libraries (including FastLED and WLED). However, they currently lack proper support for our chosen chip (ESP32-C6)—at least for now.
The FLS-M firmware already has a working effect engine, but we deactivated it for the initial release, as it wasn’t refined enough for Matter certification.
That said, I’d love to hear feedback from you (and others reading this) on my proposed approach for implementing effects and animations for addressable Light-EPs:
I plan to give these defined Light-EP sections a configurable “persona” that determines how the selected color and brightness are displayed. A default persona could be set via the Config-Builder and could also be changed on the fly via a custom cluster for Zigbee/Matter.
The current implementation would become the “Static” persona, while your proposed effect would become the “Gradient” persona. Additionally, you could assign two EPs to the same section of a strip—one with a “Static” persona and another with a “Dynamic” persona.
This approach might feel a bit clunky for “dumb” Smart Home Supervisors like HomeKit or Google Home, but at least it would allow them to use the effects since they would still appear as regular lamps. In deCONZ and Home Assistant, we could integrate persona selection directly into the frontend.
As I mentioned, this is still a work in progress, but feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Since the Hue Gradient Strip requires a set amount of color zones, i don’t know if a ‘dynamic’ persona would be the right choice. It seems to generic to be compatible as an emulated light. I’d prefer a selection, what lamp the light strip or the section should represent. (Color Lamp, Light Color Lamp, Gradient Strip and so on)
How HomeKit and GoogleHome Interfaces with this I can’t tell.
Of course my spectrum is limited to my use case, so that’s all I can say to that … (I use the the phoscon app only as a Zigbee middleware for diy hue. From there I use the Hue Hassio integration)