Smart Home Dynamic Smart Lamp Project

Following the sucess of the dynamic smart lighting in my smart shower project, I decided to have a go at replacing the current lamp in our conservatory and to incorporate both an LED MR16 12Vdc bulb and my dynamic smart lighting as well.

The goal with this project is to provide intelligently controlled, very efficient ambient lighting in my conservatory (using an MR16 LED bulb) and to also support visual visual notifications.

Design

The design is based upon the fact that I had this 100mm diameter and 200mm tall, frosted white, glass tube spare.

The bottom of the glass is profiled, so my 3D printed base has to be designed to match this profile.

Build

This is the final 3D printed base with integrated mounts for the 24 LED pixel ring and an MR16 LED bulb.

The MR12 lamp is connected to one of my 12V dc output modules.

The pixel ring is connected via a bespoke PCB that I developed for my smart shower project.

Both connect to my Arduino shield, one of my smart home building blocks.

I already have an Arduino Mega 2560 in my conservatory, which automates and senses a whole range of things. I am using spare capacity on it for this project.

Software

Over the years, I have developed my own library of code for Arduino and this includes all the functions to integrate it into my distributed Home Control System and connect numerous types of sensors. This is designed to be reused many times in all my projects, making it very quick and easy to develop and test new smart home devices and features.

The dynamic smart lighting code is also a reusable library that can be used to create dynamic smart lighting in many form factors and I've developed it further for this project.

Smart Home Integration

The Arduino uses an Ethernet IP network interface, to enable it to send events to my Home Control System, using my unified communications protocol. I use a wired network as it is the own way to get very low latency and hence a great user experience.

Adding this lamp to my Home Control System is simply a matter of adding two lines of JSON to the main configuration file, one for the 'Conservatory Lamp' and another for the 'Conservatory Smart Lamp'. This defines the name, zone, type and also the details of the slave processor it is controlled by. All the intelligence is within my Home Control System, which receives and sends encrypted events using my unified communications protocol.

Both the Conservatory Lamp and the Conservatory Smart Lamp will receive events/requests from my Home Control System, to start effects.

In Use