LED dimmers are like $3 on AliExpress, but yeah that's much more than a potentiometer. On the other hand they handle 12-24V and like 6A of current. You can sink that kind of power into a pot.

The one we find most interesting is a PWM based dimming hack he pulled off with an Arduino board and a FET. The bulbs are designed to be dimmable through the 12V supply that feeds the light fixture.

We set the potentiometer pin as 0 (A0 on the Arduino Uno board), the CONTROL variable is the voltage that is used to cotrol the led brightness of the speed of the fan. In the setup() function the ...

High frequency local PWM dimming for high intensity LEDs has the problem of even light leveling among samples at low current. P11 is 680k Ohm and R10 is 39k Ohm. The light level is not 0-100% but ...