Reverse-engineering an LED Curtain #reverseengineering #LEDs @MrBananas

Chris Greening got some of these addressable LED curtains a while back with the intention of taking them apart and seeing how hackable they are. Turns out the answer is very hackable!

It turns out that these LEDs are pre-programmed with their position on the string – they receive all the data for all the LEDs, but they know which bit of data is relevant to them. It’s pretty bonkers – I’ve no idea how this is done in the factory where the curtains are constructed, but I assume they get a long string of pre-programmed LEDs with preset lengths and then chop them up for the curtains.

The main brains is an ST17H66B this is a Bluetooth Low Energy system on chip. The antenna for it is the wiggly line on the PCB.

We have a burst of data – this is the RGB data for the LEDs – followed by a gap – followed by another burst of data. The gap is what tells the LEDs to latch and display the current data.

So, these LED curtains should be easily hackable and we should be able to drive them using the popular WLED firmware.

So I flashed one of my ESP32s and connected up the LED curtain – and it works!

See the video below and more in the post here.


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