You know the feeling, your alarm goes off, you are groggy, you finally get out of bed only to step on something or trip over something.
It's a tragic tale, and one we know all to well...
Well I have had enough and I'm going to do something about it. I am going to make some automatic lights under my bed that turn on by themselves at a certain time.
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Here are the parts I need to get what I want done. Firstly, the LED strip itself.
Second up, an ESP32 micro-controller, this will let me run a program which can make connections over Wi-Fi, allowing it to be controlled remotely.
Third of all, a power supply to power all the LEDs at once.
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Luckily others have also wanted to remotely control strips of LEDs and there is some amazing, free, and open source software called WLED.
This website makes it so easy, you can just plug in the micro-controller via USB and upload the software using the site itself.
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After the software was uploaded I found the WLED web page that the ESP32 was now hosting. I plugged everything in and tried turning a small section of the LEDs on and it worked.
The lights were almost done.
I got to work with the software and went about setting up a playlist of lights that got brighter and brighter over a half of an hour.
Now all that was left was to test it, I figured it was kind of cheating to test it out on the spot and set it up on the timer for 7am the next morning.
The lights were a success!
To be honest they didn't work the first two days and in real life they are kind of underwhelming but I don't have a better use for the LED strip right now.
This was a simple project that anyone could do and fairly low cost as well, if you want to try making some remotely controlled lights you should absolutely give it a go.
Thanks so much for reading and have a nice day/night!
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