Since the last update, there have been a few changes. We will be using Phillips hue lights to act as our lamp to vary the parameters like hue and brightness easily.
The modes:
1. Auto
One chooses the Auto-Mode from the big selector switch.
In this mode, theLight complements the natural lighting outside and maintains the illumination level of the room. The input for this mode would be the outside lighting lux levels and the temperature outside. The controls for this mode will be the brightness adder and the hue adder. To explain it, if one feels the auto illumination is not enough, one turns the brightness adder clockwise to add to the current brightness of theLight. It will continue automatically from there on. The hue adder works in the same way for the auto mode.
2.Nostalgia Mode:
One selects one of two preset places in the nostalgia mode from the big selector switch.
This mode simulates the sun cycle of a specified place, usually from another country/time zone. TheLight slowly comes on as per the sun in the specified place. This could be achieved by placing a light sensor in that country and broadcasting those values to a server. The local server feeds theLight those values to vary the illumination realtime.
3. PinkFloyd mode
This mode is selected by the big selector switch.
This is a party mode where
the hue and brightness of the light would vary according to ambient sounds in the room creating a mood.
4. Manual Mode
The manual mode is also selected by the big selector switch.
Here, the user specifies and brightness and hue variation range and the time period of change with the two small knobs below the big selector switch. This mode gives complete control over the behavior of theLight.
Here is the overall flow of the project
LightBox:
We are planning to do this with a wooden box with matte finished acrylic. The acrylic will be laser etched with text . The knobs are going to be made out of turned wood and stained after turning. Here is a rough sketch of the layout of the switches.
The electronics have also been purchased.
We started out last week with the API for hue lights. We found multiple libraries for using the hue lights through node.js. We started messing around with a simple program to vary the brightness over time.
It actually took a long time to understand the folder structure to made the node code to work. The next step would be to integrate the sensors to input values to the hue lamps.