You want a smart and cheap good locking pixel clock with a fancy firmware and do not want to buy a very expansive Lame… pixel clock?
Here we go…
=> for german speaking people => (TUTORIAL: Alternative zu Lametric & Co. mit Ulanzi und AWTRIX Light)
What you need?
Ulanzi Pixel Clock
Awtrix Light Firmware 
A working MQTT Broker
e.g. on homey or on a seperate machine
Ok - let´s go 
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Connect the Ulanzi Pixel Clock via USB with your PC
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Open the follwing url with a chrome or edge browser
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Press the “Flasher” button and follow the instructions of the flasher. Please make sure that you choose “erase all data”, too.
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After successfull flash you will find an ap the ESP32 - just connect to this ap and enter your wifi credantials. The pixel clock will restart and connect to you wifi.
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At this point it makes sense to add a dhcp reservation in your router for your pixel clock.
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Just open in your browser of your choise the url of your new Awtrix Light pixel clock
http://ipaddressofmypixelclock
- Please navigate to “MQTT” and enter your mqtt broker address (and if needed credantials of the mqtt broker)
In the field “Prefix” you have to enter a unique name of your awtrix_light - e.g. awtrixlight01
Safe the configuration and the ESP restarts and will connect to your mqtt broker.
Your new Awtrix Light pixel clock shows status messages like temperature and humitidy of the device itself as well as time and date.
So far so good.
But what about notifications directly from the homey? No problem
Here we go…
Addition 18.10.2023:
**@Bckp created an app for homey - please check this before, because it makes things easier **
AWTRIX Light App for Homey | Homey
- let´s start with a simple flow - we send a mqtt message to the awtrix light pixel clock directly:
(this is what you see when you start…)
Just enter this to the field “Message”
{“text”:“Hello my friend”}
and into the field “Topic” you enter the exact prefix which you configured inside the awtrix light device (in the mqtt configration page) - in my case awtrixlight01
awtrixlight01/notify
Save this flow and test it and the magic happens
Congrats - you have sent your first message to you Awtrix Light - but what about an icon in your message? Here we go again…
- Add an icon to your message
To use icons in your messages you have to upload these icons to your ESP at first. You can use icons from the Awtrix 2.0 database or from the Lametric Site. The awtrix light pixel clock does not have a cloud connection
You will find more information for downloading icons here => AWTRIX LIGHT
In my case I know already a few icon numbers of the Awtrix 2.0 and I would like to download an animated sun icon to my Awtrix light pixel clock. It has the icon number 350.
So we go to the webinterface of the Awtrix light again and navigate to “Icons”
Enter the id of the icon, click on preview to check your icon and if it is correct, just press the download button. When you finished just press “safe configuration”.
Now we can edit our homey flow. Please edit the mqtt message field to
{“text”:“Hello my friend”,“icon”:“350”}
It should look like this:
Test your flow and you will get this on your pixel clock:
Congratulations! You have sent a notification with an icon from your homey directly to your Awtrix Light As you can see it was very easy.
Are you ready for the next level?
The method “notify” is more or less for pushing urgent messages to your Awtrix light like an alert message.
For showing stats and values from your smart home system I suggest to use “CustomApps” with the Awtrix light. The values will be shown in an order you defined.
When you press the middle button of your Awtrix Light for two seconds, a menu will be shown. In this menu you can navigate to “apps” and enable/disable all of the build in apps. If you disable all apps, only information you sent via mqtt will be shown on your clock.
Just modify your flow again and edit the topic to something like this:
awtrixlight01/custom/1
awtrixlight01/custom/2
awtrixlight01/custom/3
So you can define which information will be visible on your pixel clock in which order.
E.g. show values from your solar plant, wallboxes, battery, temperatues and so on
For techies:
You can choose the name after “custom/” any name you want. This name builds the app name and you can switch to this app directly via mqtt command.
You find more information directly at the Awtrix Light Projekt: of @Blueforcer
Feel free to show in the comments below this tutorial what you created
Cheers,
Sven
P.S.: Be aware of correct format of the quotes…
So not this:
{“text”:“Hello my friend”}
But this:
{"text":"Hello my friend"}
