IocTober Day 2 - Airline-style safety lighting for home or workplace
Even numbered day. Time for the first serious project of IocTober. Do you get up in the night and inevitably trip over something, or multilate yourself in an encounter with on the most dangerous OHS hazard known to humanity? (tl;dr: Nocturnal Lego)
Do you have small children or other incorrigibles who never turn lights out?
Here’s a project that I created on the weekend for my book (Yes, I’ll soon be able to say “I Wrote The Book On IoT”).
What does it do? You take a roll of low-volage self-adhesive strip that holds hundreds of tiny light-emitting diodes, and you stick it to your skirting boards or stair rails. When you get up in the night, you have soft light to help you navigate, and when you stumble back to bed, it turns itself off automatically.
Also handy for cupboards, storage rooms, garages and workbenches.
How does it work? A motion sensor and a button are both able to trigger the light, and a tiny computer takes care of turning it off again after a few minutes. A pea-sized transistor takes care of switching the power to the LED strip. But this is the Internet of things, so you can also remote trigger, from your phone, from another sensor (say, beside your bed) or from a voice assisant (“pssst, alexa, turn on the nightlight in the ensuite”).
I made the prototype with stacking IoT modules from https://wemos.cc/, and found the concept so useful that I’ve commissioned a custom module to do the job in a unit the size of a matchbox.
