I’ve been meaning to upgrade the lights in my bedroom since the day we moved into this house. I’ve added some fun light-up artwork in there, including my paper mache dragon and the new dragon wall sconces. It’s getting very dragonish. But we still had horrible track lighting that we never turned on or used. It just made everything feel washed out and pale in there.
There’s really no excuse for bad lighting in your house when you’re a professional LED artist.
I have a little archway that leads from my master bedroom into the master bath, and there is some space above the arch that’s just perfect to put a light strip. The previous homeowner left a couple straggly spider plants up there, which we’d been watering half-heartedly, so they were stringy and brown and liked to drop powdery leaves on the floor from time to time. Not really digging it with the dragon theme that’s happening, I finally got around to pulling them out and putting something wonderful in its place.
This is a super simple project. I didn’t have to solder anything – it’s all assembled with a screwdriver and a pair of wire strippers. The coding was the tricky part but I’m really happy with what I came up with.
- Bluetooth control for on/off, brightness, and mode switching
- 7 different animated light modes:
- Reading Light
- Bright White
- Rainbow swirl
- Rainbow fade
- Starry night (a blue twinkle with a white comet!)
- and of course, Fire mode
My dragons like the fire mode best. I am partial to rainbow swirl, most especially in the morning.
I got a fancy light switch with a USB port right on the unit, so I’m planning to put my old outdated iPhone to work, mounted on the wall and powered right from the switch, so I don’t have to hunt for my phone if I want to change the lighting scene.
I took them on a camping trip this weekend and put them up inside my mom’s RV and now she’s insisting she needs a rig like this for Christmas this year.
Actually she doesn’t want to wait until Christmas. She wants them NOW.
Anyway, it turned out really great.. and I’m really happy with the tutorial as well. You can check it out here:https://learn.adafruit.com/easy-no-solder-bluetooth-controlled-room-lights
And here’s the fancy video! Enjoy. 🙂
