LED strip lights are a great way to add some wow factor to your built-in bookshelves. Installation is relatively easy and once they are installed there is no limit to the types of scenes and automations you can create with your Hubitat Elevation hub.

As demonstrated in the video above, the Room Lighting app is an excellent choice for automating LED bookshelf lights. With the Room Lighting app, the four individual LED strips in these shelves can be activated together as a single device. Lighting periods can be set up so the LED strips can be turned on at different levels, colors, color temperatures and more based on the mode or time period at the time of activation. 

For these lights, we set the lighting periods like this:

Once your devices are grouped and set, you can use the Room Lighting app to set the rules for turning on and off these lights. Activation can be set based on almost any trigger, but in this example we are just having the lights activate at Sunset and turn off when the hub switches to night mode.

Here is how our final rule looks:

Note that it also says “command with activator device” under means to activate. That’s because we have other rules in different apps to turn this Room Lighting group on and off. This is made possible by the newly created group device called "Family Room Shelves" that was created by this Room Lighting rule. 

Activating Room Lighting Scenes With Other Apps

To demonstrate activating a Room Lighting scene from another app, we are going to build an automation in Basic Rules that activates two different Room Lighting scenes when the television is turned on and off. 

To do this, we need to plug our television into a power reporting smart plug. This plug will send a message to the hub every time the power draw goes up or down a certain wattage (note: in the device devices detail page, set the power reporting settings to a larger interval to lighten the load on your hub).

With our plug installed, we are going to create another scene in Room Lighting that will turn the LED strip lights in the cabinet a dim blue. The rule looks like this:

Now, to automate our two scenes, we are going to create a new rule in Basic Rules that looks like this:

Notice that the two groups we set up in the Room Lighting app (Living Room Shelves and TV Mode) are treated as devices in this rule. So when the TV turns on, the TV Mode device will activate, turning the LED strips to a dim blue. Then, when the TV turns off, the TV Mode device turns off and the Living Room Shelves device will active, which will turn LED strips to a different setting based on the time of day. 

Watch the Hub Whisperer video above to see these rules built step-by-step in the Room Lighting and Basic Rules apps. Room Lighting is very robust and if you take the time to understand its capabilities it will become an integral part of your automated home.