ESP32 + WLED controllers
Low-cost Wi-Fi controllers can run exterior neon looks, room accent lighting, holiday scenes, status cues, and Home Assistant-controlled light shows.
Now booking local work • Owensville • Cuba • Sullivan
Professional property repair, improvement, and automation.
Handyman repairs, electrical troubleshooting, custom interiors, and connected systems for homes and small businesses.
Starlight Lab handles the practical work first: small electrical and plumbing fixes, drywall and paint repair, custom interior upgrades, finish work, project planning, and clear documentation. When useful, we also connect cameras, Wi-Fi, lighting, Home Assistant, and business systems.
- Repairs
- Electrical, plumbing, drywall, and paint
- Improvements
- Custom interiors, epoxy, and finish work
- Connected spaces
- Cameras, lighting, dashboards, and controls
Build + operations layer
Repair the space. Finish the look. Connect the systems.
01
Walk the space, document problems, and map the finished goal.
02
Handle the repair, finish, wiring, lighting, camera, or device layer.
03
Add dashboards, automation, records, and clear owner handoff notes.
Mother Road Mysteries
The Last Landing at the Painted Desert Trading Post
Jamie Jessop’s Mother Road Historical Mystery is available in Kindle and paperback editions. The Kindle detail page also exposes the paperback option.
View the verified Amazon editionLive hardware stack
Microcontrollers, LEDs, dashboards, cameras, and edge computers working together.
Starlight Lab systems are built around visible, practical controls: addressable LED strips, ESP32 controllers, Raspberry Pi edge nodes, Home Assistant dashboards, PoE cameras, network gear, and API logic that makes the whole setup useful.
Addressable LED strips
RGB segments can become signage, wayfinding, alert strips, event lighting, vacancy cues, counter lighting, or a full building-sized light canvas.
Raspberry Pi edge nodes
Small computers can run kiosks, GPIO controls, signage, dashboards, audio workflows, local scripts, and specialty building controls.
Home Assistant dashboards
Owners and staff get clean screens for locks, climate, cameras, lights, signs, automations, alerts, and system health.
What we build
The work people call us for first.
Construction and custom interiors
Drywall repair, painting, finish work, custom interior upgrades, epoxy surfaces, trim details, repair punch lists, and photo-ready before/after improvements.
Electrical, lighting, and controls
Lighting circuits, fixture additions, switching corrections, motion controls, sensor-controlled sign and exterior-light feeds, WLED systems, troubleshooting, and documented handoff.
Plumbing and property repairs
Small plumbing repairs, fixture and supply-line troubleshooting, utility-area improvements, leak-response planning, and practical repair-list work.
Design and planning drawings
Concept layouts, room planning, finish ideas, simple architectural-style drawings, measurements, material plans, and visual prep for a build or remodel.
Home Assistant dashboards
Smart-home and smart-building control panels for locks, lights, climate, signs, sensors, power devices, schedules, notifications, and room status.
Security cameras and low-voltage
Camera planning, PoE network layout, recorder support, remote access cleanup, motion-aware alerts, and practical coverage maps.
Business automation
Workflows that connect calendars, booking systems, staff dashboards, signs, thermostats, locks, power monitoring, logs, and reports.
Networks and documentation
Router, Wi-Fi, VLAN, guest network, device inventory, and backup documentation built so the system can be maintained.
Hospitality operations
Motel and small-property workflows for room status, checkout actions, lock-code lifecycle, signage, climate reset, and staff views.
Starlight Bridge middleware
A secure bridge between cloud services and local systems, with authorization, retries, audit logs, and customer-specific rules.
Core services
Clear service pages for the work customers ask about first.
ServicesFull service overview
Construction & InteriorsDrywall, paint, repair, custom finish, epoxy, and build-ready upgrades
Home AutomationHome Assistant and smart-building dashboards
Security CamerasCamera, PoE, and low-voltage planning
Business AutomationSmall-business operating workflows
HospitalityLocks, climate, room status, Wi-Fi, signage, and staff views
PlatformStarlight Bridge, Home Assistant, WLED, locks, APIs, and logs
WorkGitHub-backed research lanes and sanitized field patterns
MiddlewareCloudbeds-style API and automation bridge
Research-backed build lanes
The public offer now reflects the real project stack.
The Starlight Lab website has been expanded from a basic service page into a business surface for the active work: construction and interior repair, custom finish work, hospitality middleware, Home Assistant dashboards, Schlage lock workflows, WLED lighting, camera/network infrastructure, field-service tracking, and specialty Raspberry Pi controls.
Construction and interiors
Drywall, paint, custom finishes, epoxy work, repair punch lists, and spaces prepared for lighting, cameras, dashboards, and clean handoff photos.
Local control layer
Home Assistant, WLED, cameras, routers, VLANs, device inventory, and manual override paths stay understandable and recoverable.
Starlight Bridge
Cloud software enters through scoped APIs, gets normalized, passes safety rules, and reaches local systems without exposing secrets.
Starlight Bridge
Connect Cloudbeds-style booking data to local Home Assistant automations.
Starlight Bridge keeps cloud systems, private credentials, and local devices in the right places. Cloud services send authorized events to a public HTTPS endpoint. Middleware validates and normalizes the data. Home Assistant receives only the local event it needs to update dashboards or trigger approved automations.
- Cloudbeds or another platform stays the system of record.
- Home Assistant stays local and owner-controlled.
- API secrets and guest-sensitive data stay out of dashboards and GitHub.
- Live changes start in dry-run mode, then one pilot device, then rollout.
Cloud system
Bookings, room status, webhooks
Starlight Bridge
Authorize, normalize, map, log
Local control
Locks, climate, signage, dashboards
How projects stay safe
Start with visibility, prove it safely, then automate.
Map the system
Inventory devices, accounts, networks, dashboards, APIs, and current pain points.
Separate access
Use API authorization and dedicated service accounts instead of broad personal passwords.
Dry-run first
Show exactly what would happen before a lock, thermostat, sign, or camera system changes.
Pilot one device
Test a non-critical device or room before expanding automation across the property.
Built for owner control
Automation should reduce app-juggling, not create another black box.
Starlight Lab focuses on systems the owner can understand: clean diagrams, clear logs, manual overrides, backups, and dashboards that staff can actually use.
No secret sprawl
Credentials stay in private runtime environments, not public repos or dashboard files.
Documented networks
Device inventory, VLAN intent, IP notes, and recovery paths are part of the job.
Manual override
Owners keep access through Home Assistant and original vendor apps where appropriate.
Start a project
Tell us what needs built, repaired, powered, connected, or controlled.
Good first projects include electrical and lighting corrections, drywall/paint repair, custom interior upgrades, epoxy work, camera planning, Home Assistant dashboards, guest Wi-Fi cleanup, device inventory, small-business automations, and booking-system-to-local-system middleware.
Call or text
Start with a quick description, safe-distance photos, the building type, and what is not working or needs improved.