Nightlights are a great way to calm children who may be afraid of the dark, as well as to avoid stubbing your toe on furniture in the hallway. However, in this day and age of connected everything, they can do so much more. [Andy] came up with a great way to do just that, creating an advanced networked solution to suit his needs.
[Andy’s] nightlight serves not just in the usual fashion, but also as an indicator for his children. Depending on the time of day, the colour changes, indicating whether it’s time for bed, or also, if it’s too early to get out of bed in the morning and start watching cartoons. Each nightlight around the house runs on an ESP8266, which lights up using a set of WS2812B LEDs. The ESP8266 decides on colour values based on commands from a basic webserver running on a Raspberry Pi, updated every minute. This gives [Andy] the flexibility to make changes in one place, that then automatically roll out across the Nightlight Network (TM).
It’s a fun way of teaching the kids not to ruin a good Saturday sleep in, as well as serving as a fun colourful nightlight, too. Of course, luxury smart nightlights are becoming a thing, as this teardown of a Bluetooth unit shows. If you’ve built your own, be sure to drop us a line!
I knew it. Unicorns are evil and have mind control.
This could be a nice usecase for ESP-Mesh https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-mesh-esp32-esp8266-painlessmesh/
also, for the fun part, add a color-sensor to a master node and have all the devices adjust to that color.
Nice adaptation of the concept like Outwit(glowing ball) or Zazu(Sheep) offer it.
I builded a raspberry pi zero based child watch with a small display few month ago.
It runs by a little, urgly written Pygame script.
Instead just showing a colored background it shows a picture of a bed, when it is time to sleep/stay in bed.
And when it is time to active it show pictures like a ball, building blocks and a car.(will add more scenes if it makes sense. And maybe something like a “progress bar”)
My two years old can interpret this drawings very well ;-)
For the grown-up there is a normal digital clock,too.
I reused my consoles left overs from the homeautomation/ smart home project.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2892347
I’m currently working on something similar that has a motion sensor that detects if my autistic neice wakes at night and gently brightens to calm her, and dims again as she nods off. Having a centrally controlled system won’t work as my sister is not tech savvy, so rotary dials all the way.
At the moment my code is bad and it strobes, but I’m getting there :)