Apartment Lights
- 1 minA couple years ago I made a DIY gift for my husband. I fitted our apartments with LEDs, custom animations, and an app to control them.
Animations
We’ve got some unique animations, coded by me but with direction from Josh
Stars
Waves
Fireworks
Of course, the lights can just be on, or we have a preset that puts them on a dim orange setting to promote sleepiness.
App
The lights are controlled with an app we’ve codenamed Lite Brite. You can get to the controls on the lock screen. The left side controls the living room and the right buttons control the bedroom lights.
[Lock Screen Lights]
Inside the app you can also set an alarm time. When the alarm goes off the lights in the bedroom slowly turn on and then begin to flash.
[Full App]
Components
The living room has 10 meters of LEDs. They are the NeoPixel LEDs from Adafruit.
The LEDs are controlled by a Raspberry Pi which is running the custom software. It communicates with a server (written in Go and hosted by Heroku) so we can change the lights even from outside the apartment. It it fun to change the lights and try to find our window on the skyline.
Extra Fun
After a vacation to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter was cancelled, I put in our own magic. There is a Harry Potter wand which recognizes gestures and acts just like a TV remote. By adding an infrared sensor to the Raspberry Pi, it can receive commands from the wand.
[Wizard video]
Josh’s latest request is to endow a gavel with the powers of Mjölnir. We will see where that goes…
Bridger Maxwell
I’m an iOS-and-other-stuff developer in NYC. I’m a founder of Scribble and work at Facebook.