Overview

I decided that my office area needed some better lighting, but thought I'd have a go at designing my own IoT solution to the problem. Using a strip of LEDs from Amazon, Python and a blinkstick, I wrote an alternative.

The Project

The inital version of the app was successful, using a blinkstick wired to a type 5050 LED lighting strip, allowing one colour to be set down the lighting strip. The app runs both as a website and as a web-app on mobile devices, with presets available for popular colours or manual selection with instant colour change.

One thing I learned along the way is that some strips are wired the other way around, so if your colours look the opposite of what you set, you might be missing bstick.set_inverse(True) from your script!

The project was added to in version 1.5 due to popular demand, where a cinema mode allows the brightness to be dimmed down during programmes, so the lighting gets out of the way and gives enough light to see the room but not much else.

Tools Used

• The project was written in Python
• The web interface was written in Flask
• A BlinkStick
• Type 5050 LED strip

Outcome

The project works really well now it’s complete, with instantaneous colour updates from the app, and due to iOS keeping progressive web-apps in memory, it opens super quick on devices too. The project passed user testing when it was given to my family and they could all use it successfully!