Intro
In a world of smart home enthusiasts LED projects have always been always a hot topic. If you google for Home Assistant LED lamp you'd be surprised how many projects there are. Commercial market is flooded with all varieties of LED lamps too, from big brands to multiple rip-offs.
If you already know me you probably also know my elevated interest to IoT projects. LED lamp in particular. I tried many different solutions and it's great journey to learn something new about hardware and software. And I wanted to share my experience with you.
My past experience was diverse. I built a few projects with ESP8266 microcontroller and integrated it for Apple HomeKit using different libraries. All of that on top of WS2812B LED strip. Besides learning I had another big driver - all of my projects were gifted to people that matter to me and it's a great feeling when they enjoy it.
I took a big inspiration from WLED Project, which is developer-oriented, so I didn't want to burden my "users" with it and HomeKit is a way simpler to use.
I have been working on a new project for a few months now, on and off, and it's still in development. It brought a lot of joy and some level of frustration too, but I want to share my experience with you.
My goal is to create a generic LED lamp based on popular microcontroller, specifically:
- It must be available everyone, so I can't use Home Kit (iOS only) for WLED (not as user-friendly).
- Instead I'll be building a custom mobile app for both iOS and Android with React Native.
- It should have click or sensor buttons to control it.
- At best it should be done with custom PCB, so it can be used in different lamps.
- As result - I'll be developing custom shells for each type of lamp in CAD and 3D printing it for prototyping.
- ....
Hardware
We will start with ESP-32 as a microcontroller.
To be continued...