[BK7231N (CB3S)] Merkury Smart Wi-Fi LED Strip RGBW [PN: MI-EW010-999WW]

This was a great success and I stood on the shoulders of this thread for a very similar product.

This Merkury LED Strip shows up in the Smart Life app as Merkury EW020 Smart LED Strip, however was sold to me with the model MI-EW010-999WW. I can't find that anywhere on the box or product itself so I went with the advertised model.

The product photos from that thread are nearly identical to this one so I didn't go to great detail in getting more photos. Just one of the box and one of the board since this uses the CB3S chip so it's a little different to set up.



Flashing was mostly straightforward. I had a moment where the board didn't seem to be responding to button presses or recovering after power cycling by unplugging it. I thought it was bricked, but shorting GRND to CEN briefly forced a reboot and things got going again. This happened more than once after the firmware backup step starting with a device fresh from the box and not yet set up so if someone has trouble with the flashing process keep that in mind.

I also had trouble with the flashing tool not being able to automatically discover the correct config to use. From that other thread and some fiddling with the GPIO discovery tools I settled on this config.

8 is RED
24 is GREEN
26 is BLUE
7 is WHITE
9 is BUTTON



With this everything works as expected. Even the button is able to control power and cycle through some scenes. Notably, I set these flags to get the behavior I was expecting. This strip is RGBW (I think it's RGBWW, but honestly the light is pretty cool even at the warmest setting).

Flag 12 - [LED] Remember LED driver state (RGBCW, enable, brightness, temperature) after reboot
Flag 24 - [LED] Emulate Cool White with RGB in device with four PWMS - Red is 0, Green 1, Blue 2, and Warm is 4

Good job! So, the device is working now as you want it to, or is there anything we can improve?
If you have some time and will to fiddle with it, you can for example try adding some external sensors, like DHT11, DS18B20 or BMP280. They are easily configurable with OBK and they won't affect device functionality and they still can be seen easily by HA Discovery. You still have many CB3S pins unused and this could be used for some hacking.

You could also solder the extra transistor which can be seen as missing on photo (Q1) and get full RGBCW experience, as long as you connect matching LED strip.

Working exactly as expected! Good to know there's room on the board to make these more useful than just light strips if I need them to be. I have a stock of them so it opens up project opportunities.