The reason for creating this controller is an unresolved issue that has persisted for a long time, described here: home-assistant/core#102809. This solution will likely become obsolete after the official fix for the problem. The controller allows you to manage the state (on/off) and brightness of your Twinkly device. Tested on my Twinkly Strings 2.8.18
What we will need:
- Docker + Docker Compose
- A static IP address for your Twinkly device
STEP 0
Connect your Twinkly device to your network using the official app. In your router's settings, assign a static IP address to the device.
STEP 1
Install Docker and Docker Compose on your Home Assistant server. There are numerous guides available on how to do this, so I won't describe the process here. I will only mention that I used Docker Compose v2, so the commands described here will be without a hyphen (if you are using an older version, the commands are executed using docker-compose).
STEP 2
Upload the files twinkly_api.php, apache-dockerfile, and apache-docker-compose.yml to your Home Assistant server in a single directory. Then, execute the following command to build and run the container with the Apache web server, which Home Assistant will use to send requests to your Twinkly device:
docker compose -f apache-docker-compose.yml up --build -d
STEP 3
Next, we need to edit the configuration.yaml file in Home Assistant. In my case, Home Assistant also running in a Docker container, so I will edit it there:
docker exec -it homeassistant sh
nano configuration.yaml
At the end of your configuration.yaml file, add the contents of the configuration.yaml file from this repository.
IMPORTANT: After inserting the content into configuration.yaml, REPLACE ALL MENTIONS of the IP address with the actual IP address of your Twinkly device.
Next, you need to restart Home Assistant.
docker restart homeassistant
STEP 4
Add a card to your dashboard to control the Twinkly device. Here is how it looks on my dashboard:
type: entities
entities:
- entity: light.twinkly
title: Bedroom
