Mood Lights

Inspiration

We decided to create this project out of a personal want; A want to enhance relaxation at home. With Online Schooling and Quarantine, we have spent an increasing amount of time in our rooms constantly studying. To avoid the stresses of school, what’s better than some chill vibes? Introducing, Mood Lights!

What it does

Our project, Mood Lights, is a smart Light-controlled Mood Ambient Device that is designed to reduce stress by using light patterns. It has different modes including weather mode, relaxing animations, notifications, etc. It allows you to control it using a remote control or by using Google Home's Voice Commands.

How we built it

Our project uses a/an:

LED strip
Arduino Uno
Raspberry Pi 3
Google Home
Remote

We built this lamp by connecting a strip of individually addressable LEDS to an Arduino Uno. The Arduino controls each individual led using logic and a library called FAST Led. Since the Arduino has no on-board WiFi and doesn’t have much processing power, we hooked up a Raspberry Pi to it in order to send in the required data to the Arduino. The Raspberry Pi is responsible for fetching data from OpenWeatherMaps and doing the heavy computations. It receives instructions from the Google Home. We connected the Google Home to the lamp via a website named IFTTT. This website sends info to my Adafruit feed, which I then use my Python program to fetch data from.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many problems ranging from logistics to troubles debugging the hardware. One of the challenges we faced on the logistical front, was the wrong number of ping-pong balls showing up. We managed to use Amazon Prime to get the parts on time, but it was still a headache. Another big challenge for us was to get the Raspberry Pi to connect to the Arduino. They have different voltages, and the Arduino wasn't reading the raspberry Pi's output. After a few hours of trial and error, we found that tying the ground from the Arduino and Raspberry Pi together seemed to fix the problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to make our project:

Integrate Custom Voice Commands with Google Home
Display some cool animations
Show Calendar Notifications
Integrated Remote Control
Display certain animations based on the Weather

What we learned

We learned about the challenges involved when combining software and hardware; Things will not work as you expect it to first try. We also learned about how we can better coordinate our team by learning from the mistakes we made in this project.