Recent content on The Forgetful Dev
Test Your Components We’re going to start building our control box shortly, but there’s a critical step first… Power supplies can be bad out of the box, you can buy the wrong relay, WLED firmware needs updatec, etc. A 30 minute bench test to confirm everything turns on and does the correct thing before you spend time laying it out and mounting it in the box is the best way to…
Track Position and Layout Planning I live on top of a hill, on a cul-de-sac. off a cul-de-sac. The end result is that my house is easily visible from all sides but one. If I was going to run permanent LEDs, I figured I might as well cover all four sides. You absolutely don’t have to – many people only light the front – but the visibility (plus fun animations) made the decision easy for…
Installing a Full-Length Track 📌 Start with only a base track. All drilling and mounting discussed in this section should happen to the base track only. For a full-length track there's no need to pair the base with a puck track since they're all the same. When we get to cutting tracks for shorter lengths, that's when we'll work with the puck track as well. 1. Drill Mounting Holes In Base I…
Renting Heavy Equipment (Man Lift) Why I Needed a Lift There are two areas on my house where a higher peak sits behind another peak. Because of the height and angles involved, there was no safe way to get there with a ladder without doing something extremely dumb.
Primary Wiring This section covers the wiring that leaves the electronics box and heads toward your lights, including any “dark” spans where you’re routing cable but don’t want LEDs. We’re assuming you already mapped out your start, middle, and end points back in Planning.
Last updated: December 24, 2025 The vast majority of what you need to know about installing puck tracks is covered in the “Before you install anything” section and on the “Lights” page in the “Installation” section.
Wiring The Lights This section covers how to handle the wiring between the light strands. There is going to be some overlap here between this section and others (puck-tracks, before-you-install-anything, primary-wiring) because there are so many circular dependencies, but the focus on this one is about installing the actual puck lights.
Why Roof Pitch Even Came Up The thing that pushed me into this whole project was my old string lights. They ran straight across the tops of the peaks instead of following the actual roofline. It looked fine from a distance but once you noticed it, you couldn’t un-see it. I wanted lights that matched the angles of my house cleanly.
Thinking Ahead You’ve created a plan and ordered all your parts, and you’re ready to start installing. But there’s still a number of things to understand before you start.
Welcome This is a guide written about how I installed permanent outdoor puck lights on my house, control them via WLED, and integrated them in to Home Assistant.