Fun Ways to Brighten Up Your Home
Arduino lighting is a form of electronics building that uses a single board microcontroller to perform several functions at once. There are many ways to use Arduino lighting to decorate your home; at this point, most people are using this fun and versatile form of lighting as hobbyists. You can do some really great things using this style of lighting. It can be used to brighten up furniture like coffee tables, create a wall-mounted light display, or even synchronize flashing Christmas lights with popular carols and songs.
Constructing one of these displays ranges from “embarrassingly simple” to “complex and in need of at least one engineering degree”. You can find most of the supplies at a hobby shop but may need to resort to a specialist electronics supplier to get exactly what you need. You will need a soldering gun and various soldering accessories, as well as wire strippers, not to mention the bulbs and the platform from which to build the display.
When you construct your Arduino light setup, be sure to keep all of the soldering accessories organized and within reach. Few things are worse than embarking on a project just to find you have no idea where you left your wire cutters, and having to try to improvise with scissors (helpful hint: this doesn’t work). Don’t forget that “measure twice, cut once” applies here; making and double-checking your calculations and measurement before getting started is very important.
Once you’ve gotten the basics down, all it takes is some attention to detail, some excellent drawings, and an aptitude for the electrical, and you can make something simple like an LED cube.
This takes a little practice with soldering and some patience; you may not get it on your first try. Once you do, then you can move on to more complicated, displays like a coffee table you can play Snake on.
Arduino lights can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. You can even use your phone to control them.
This means you can control the lights even when you’re not in the room. While you might thing this sort of setup should be made by an experienced engineer or well-versed hobbyist, a beginner can work their way up to this level relatively quickly, there are endless practice exercises and tutorials online with videos and parts lists.
Ultimately, a very talented hobbyist or electrical engineer can theoretically take on rather complicated microcontroller projects. You could even to create a system to bathe your home cinema room in ambient light based on the color of the image on the screen.
While this seems like a bit of a gimmick, it is actually quite effective. For a Sci-Fi film set in orbit, the lights dim and the walls become an extension of space. If the characters then land on the moon, the ambient light matches the color of the moon rock and gives a hint to your peripheral vision that the image is larger than just your new 1080p flat screen.
These versatile, affordable, and user-friendly setups take a little getting used to, not to mention some practice. The same is true of every hobby. You didn’t learn how to knit or work on cars on your first try, so expect learning Arduino light setups to take a little time. Once you get the hang of it, though, you may find yourself hooked on learning more intricate and complex work.
Jessica Cook was the only girl in her electronics class, something that she’s got used to over the years. Now she writes to inspire others, of both sexes, about what you can create, design and build with the latest Arduino kits from Newark.