I have completed a nice large greenhouse for the wife. Her geek husband added 10W amorph solar cells, a charge controller and battery to keep the greenhouse truly green. The wife would like LED RGB strip and that's fine and dandy, except I'd like something a la the Philips Hue bulbs (8W) which can be controlled over wifi and where you can interface with a REST API. I thought of taking apart such a bulb, and just do away with the 230->12 DC-DC converter, but it won't exactly become an LED strip. So I wonder, are anyone of you aware of people doing their own version using a Hue compatible API connecting discrete RGB LED strips?
If I were to dive into this myself, what's the cheapest wifi "internet-of-things" capable platform? (I prefer non-Arduino AVR stuff)