I got the power supply in the mail today, for powering the light over my bed. At $16 it wasn’t cheap, but it was UL-certified and seems like it has a good cord and is hefty from it’s weight. I expect it will last a long time, and pose little fire or electrocution risk, despite sitting next to my bed to power the light over my bed. While I didn’t measure the voltage, I assume it’s output is somewhat above 12 volts even with a 2 amp load, as it seems like the LED strip driven by it is a little brighter then with my other knock-off $9 power supply that powers the colored LED stips in my apartment.

The next step is to wire up a board with a MOSFET transistor, Arduino, and bluetooth module. Not super big deal. The code should be quite simple, as it’s just one channel to control via pulse with modulation, and of talking to Bluetooth module, which is actually just a very basic serial module that converts whatever you send it with the phone into plain text. At 27 watts, it’s a bit too bright and energy hungry for my liking, but that will be good for waking up in the morning, and maybe for reading. The rest of the time, I will use pulse width modulation to appropriately dim the light to more reasonable level. All and all, with the LEDs in the lumiere, I am a bit disappointed at the level of illumination per watts inputted, but I guess a home made LED smart light is never going to be efficient as a commercial LED bulb. I think the output is probably close to 80-100 incandescent bulb, although the light is spread out over a meter, so it’s a bit hard to judge.

The plan is eventually to upgrade the main colored LED strip that gives soothing reds and a “virtual” sunset and sunrise each weekdays into something driven by an ESP32 microprocessor, instead of the Arduino Uno that is currently controlling it. This will eliminate the flicker on the blue channel, which has never worked right because the infrared remote module screws up one of the PWM channel timers, and there is only 3 separate timers on the ATmega 328 microprocessor used on Ardunio. The ESP32 with it’s greater ram and speed not only will be able to handle the many colors betters, it will have Bluetooth to communicate with the warm white strip over my bed, turn it on automatically in the morning. I don’t plan to include a clock module with the warm white strip — all the timing will come from the DS-3231 timer clock on the ESP32 and be sent over Bluetooth as a slave, I mean follower.

This is a work in process, but the things I learn about microproccessors and lighting will help me be smarter about electricity, increase my ability to build low-cost devices, and use energy responsibly, which will be an even bigger deal when I own my own land.