So I decided on LED light strip with white only PN:
STN-A40K90-O16A-08L5M-24V
And when purchasing them I was told this controller would allow the fade in when powered on function:
GL-C-009P-RM
This one came with a remote which was kind of useless for me.
This was a hardwired setup using a Leviton smart switch PN:
D2MSD-1RW
And Amazon LED driver:
708191202189
I also had to buy a ZigBee 3.0 Hub to connect the controllers to wifi and then use the SmartLife app to connect the controllers and setup the fade.
The app uses AI to run functions so instead of accessing settings or running commands, I typed in Fade on 5 seconds when powered on and it automatically ran that setup. I think I would prefer to have manually figured it out, but it worked none the less.
I didn’t necessarily have a budget on this one and if it was an option probably would have had multi-color LEDs that did patterns and music shows etc. But I noticed I couldn’t find any controllers that were capable of doing this, or at least were marketed that way. I did as much research as I could but someone smarter than me may clarify this… but from what I’ve gathered the controller function that fades lights (PWM control) is also used to change colors.
In this application because I wanted to fade the lights on at the same time the controller was powered up it sounds like it would have been difficult to do this with a color and pattern making capable LED strip for 2 reasons.
1st, in order to create white transitioning from dim to full all color LEDs would need to be PWM controlled at the same exact amount through the entire process. Which most controllers can do but from what I read this is difficult to do at startup. Which ties into the other issue I read about which is that at startup many (some or all) controllers used with LED strips that can create patterns or dance to music need to send a signal down the LED strip at power up to determine the length of the strip. And when this happens the lights flicker which defeats the purpose.
One solution might be to use a controller that is powered on all the time and uses a motion sensor trigger connected to the controller to trigger a fade in power on sequence. In this application the light switch location was already in a perfect position, and everything was prewired before cabinet installation so running a motion sensor wiring back through the walls would have not been ideal. The solution of using a white only strip with this controller worked just fine.
One feature I wanted that we didn’t get was the lights to fade off. But the Leviton motion sensor has a timer on it and when it shuts off it just cuts power. The Leviton switch does have a fade in and out function but that is useless because it powers up the transformer/LED driver.
I could set a fade out timer in the controller but that wouldn’t accomplish what we want either. Example the Leviton switch times out after 3 minutes but the LED controller is set to fade the lights out after 2 minutes. But the problem with this is that the Leviton switch will reset that 3 minute timer as long as it sees motion. But the 2 minute timer in the controller wouldn’t reset meaning it would just shutoff after 2 minutes even if there was still motion in the area.
But overall I’m very happy with this setup and hopefully this helps someone else down the line!