[Matt Meerian]’s workbench seems to be in perpetual shadow, so he has become adept at mounting LED strips under all his shelves and cabinets. These solve any problems involving finding things in the gloom, but present a new problem in that he risks a lot of LED strips being left on, and going round turning them all off is tedious.
His solution is to make a wireless controller for all his home LED strips, under the command of a web app from his Android tablet. An ESP8266 and a set of MOSFETs provide the inner workings, and the whole is presented on a very compact and well-designed purple OSH Park PCB reflow soldered on a $20 Wal-Mart hotplate and set in a plastic enclosure. The web interface is still in development, but has a fairly simple CSS front end for the ESP8266 code. All software, the schematic, and BoM can be downloaded from the Hackaday.io page linked above.
This project isn’t going to end world hunger or stop wars, but it’s beautifully done and well documented, and it makes [Matt]’s life a lot easier. And that makes it a good entry for the Hackaday Prize.
This product already exists and costs about $12 http://hackaday.com/2015/08/25/esp8266-in-commercial-products/ I know the point here is it’s home made, which is nice, but sometimes there really isn’t any point making it yourself. If you want to hack the original one it’s easy enough to reprogram the esp8266 on it and just do a software hack.
I amagine the builder had fun and learned alot.
Why build anything anymore when you can buy nearly anything from Ali for $10.
This is a true point. But my enthusiasm to build something decreases significantly when I can get it for half the price ready made. Of course this can mean, that the range of DIY projects decreases.
Each to their own approach Richard, personally I can imagine a lot of fun in designing and building this.
Project author here… Yes, many electronics on hackaday can be replaced with commercial products. (cell phone app, Raspberry pi, arduino, etc.) My view of things is designing and assembling the hardware is the fun part. There are some differences between the two, but it really doesn’t matter. My goal was to make something that I use on a daily basis. (9 out of 10 of my projects end up in a box, never to see the light of day again)
A CSS front end? I’d love to know how to write a front end just using CSS. That really would be a hack!
Seems a copy and paste error, reference is made in the original project to css from a css button generator site.
Not so much a copy and past error as repeating what the designer put in his write-up. We prefer a light touch when it comes to putting words into the mouths of project creators even if it’s obvious to the most casual of readers that there’s a bit more to it.
I control a ~4 meter long strip under my kitchen cabinets using a custom PIR controller, PIR module is an eBay $1.50 module, a custom board made using Fritzing, the board has an ATTiny 85, 5v regulator, diode for reverse polarity and MOSFET to drive the LED strip which is a 12v strip from AliExpress, cost about $9 for 5 meters.
It’s been running for over 2 years now without fault.
https://imgur.com/gallery/CdBKt
nice. Looks like it works well. Do you have a schematic posted anywhere?
No but I’ll publish something as soon as I dig up the files.
Just uploaded to Fritzing, I should probably do a proper write up on a blog at some point.
http://fritzing.org/projects/attiny85-pir-led-controller