D.I.Y internet controlled living room ambient light

I needed some light in my living room and decided to make it myself.

The lights are some cheap LED strips from eBay with a red, green and blue led on a little cluster.

Parts used for this project:

  • Arduino nano
  • Ethernet shield
  • ULN2003
  • LED strip
  • (20 plastic clips)
  • (3D printer)

It is made so the colors will fade between the selected, instead of just switching.

To set a color, call http ://192.168.1.50/255-255-255 this will then stay for 60 seconds, and fade back to the sticky setting.
If you want to make a color stick, call http ://192.168.1.50/_255-255-255_STICK and it will then fade to this. If someone else then changes the color without the STICK in the end, it will change to that color, and fade back to the setting you made with the STICK in the end.

This way people can still play with the light, without I have to worry about it being turned on all day.

(video parts start around 0:45)

Source: D.I.Y internet controlled living room ambient light - Pastebin.com

Try the lights live here: - link removed -

Well no-one has complimented you on a job well done yet so I do. Its a lot of work to make the clips and boards and make them run as well . Thats a CNC machine is it . Did you make that yourself too?

Well done anyway . Its very satisfying personally to achieve such results
I will be trying to get time to try such before next Xmas.

tytower:
Well no-one has complimented you on a job well done yet so I do. Its a lot of work to make the clips and boards and make them run as well . Thats a CNC machine is it . Did you make that yourself too?

Well done anyway . Its very satisfying personally to achieve such results
I will be trying to get time to try such before next Xmas.

Thank you :slight_smile:

I made the 3D printer myself too yes. Isn't that hard making the clips with it, took me around 15 minutes to design the first, and another 15 minutes with a few tries to get it the perfect size.
After that I just had to put in how many columns and rows of them I wanted, and they were then printed fully automated. :slight_smile:

Finally got away from the breadboard version, and instead made this...

But got a problem, at some light combinations the some of the colors start to flicker, and I am 100% sure that I have not made a mistake in the code that makes it change, because when I connect some led's directly instead of the ULN2003 they do not flicker...

So I thought it was the ULN2003 that was broken, but after changing that, they are still flickering...

Reading elsewhere I noticed that an 8 meter stip was acting irrationally . The poster found that a suggestion to also power the strip in the middle and at the other end fixed the problem. I wondered if your problem might also relate to the voltage and current supplied?

tytower:
Reading elsewhere I noticed that an 8 meter stip was acting irrationally . The poster found that a suggestion to also power the strip in the middle and at the other end fixed the problem. I wondered if your problem might also relate to the voltage and current supplied?

Hmm, I can try... Wonder if it would be helping too if I use 3 more outputs from the ULN2003 to power it from the opposite end. So I spread the load over 6 transistors instead.