News · New this week
Glow: control a Lotus Lantern LED strip without the app
An ELK-BLEDOM style LED strip only needs a short Bluetooth message, so I sent it from my Mac and gave it a job.
The app that came with your LED strip is the worst part of the strip. Lotus Lantern is the one I mean, and I deleted it.
The strip never needed it. These Bluetooth RGB strips, the ELK-BLEDOM kind that use Lotus Lantern, just listen for a short Bluetooth message. The message says which colour and how bright. That's the whole protocol as far as the reel is concerned.
What the strip actually does
Once you see it as a listener, the app stops being special. It's one more thing that sends the same short message. Anything that can talk Bluetooth can take its place, including a laptop.
So I send that message from my Mac. One command, and the strip goes red. Then blue. Then green. I built the tool with Claude, an AI coder, and called it Glow.
Giving the strip a job
Controlling colours is the easy part. The more useful bit is that the strip can report state while I'm not looking at a screen.
I use Claude Code as my AI assistant. When it gets stuck and needs me, the whole wall pulses. I don't have to keep a terminal in view to notice that it's waiting. A pulsing wall is hard to miss.
The other trigger goes the opposite way. When I lock my Mac, the strip goes dark. Nobody's at the desk, so the light has no reason to be on.
Both are the same idea. An event happens on the computer, and Glow turns it into a colour and a brightness.
The remote is a website
I also built the remote as a website. Open it on your phone and tap connect. There's no app to install and no login, and it runs fully on your phone.
Browser support matters here, because the site needs to talk Bluetooth.
On Android, open it in Chrome.
On iPhone, use the free Bluefy browser, because Safari can't talk to Bluetooth. If the page won't connect on an iPhone, that's the first thing to check.
What to try
If your strip is one of the ELK-BLEDOM style ones that ships with Lotus Lantern, you can drop the app and drive it yourself. Start by getting a single colour to change from your own machine. After that, wire it to something you already wait on, like an assistant that stalls or a locked screen.
For the link to the remote, comment GLOW on the reel and I'll DM it to you. And send it to the friend whose LED strip has been on rainbow since the day they bought it.
