The Philips HUE lighting system is very cool. Wifi control of your lighting, full color lighting, etc. You simply replace your regular bulbs with HUE bulbs and gain the an immediate improvement by having switched to LED lighting. Open up the HUE app on your smartphone and you can have very precise control of on/off, brightness, and color (with color bulbs) of individual bulbs.
That’s great, but is having to dig out your phone is as bad as having to walk to the wall switch, other than not have to get out of bed to turn lights on/off. And who carries their phone when going for a midnight snack? Using an voice assistant like Amazon Echo (which I use) helps, but you still have to proactively do something and you have to be withing earshot of the device. Wouldn’t it be nice if the lighting was controlled for you, turning on and off automatically. That’s what we’ll do in the project.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
