One of the activities was the modification of an Ikea lamp. Originally the lamp (type: Ikea Rutbo) had 3 light bulbs. I removed the bulbs, all wiring and placed led strips; 4 warm-white and 2 RGB strips. With this the lamp is capable of giving good quality and dimmable warm-white light, and has also color-changing capabilities like the LivingColors.
But, in getting this to work some hardware and software is needed. I have chosen Jeenode as basis for controlling my mood lights; relative cheap, easy to get started with, and for the functions I needed the boards/plugs/shields were available.
The lamp is controlled by a Jeenode + the 16-channel dimmer plug, of which 4 channels are used (1 for warm-white, 3 for RGB). I developed the Jeenode software and a wireless protocol using the Jeenode's RF12. The wireless protocol is home-brew and currently called HomeNet. Since I use Homeseer for my HomeAutomation I also developed a Homeseer plugin in C#.
In short, the system works as following: One Jeenode is connected via USB to the Homeseer server and this Jeenode communicates wireless to the other Jeenodes. The implementation of a mood light (in fact; each HomeNet node) is fully hidden by the wireless protocol; the Homeseer plugin does not know whether a color-changing Jeenode is using the dimmerplug, it is a LivingColor or a DMX master; they all listen to the same commands. (... and then you directly know which Jeenode based devices/mood-lights I currently have; 1) the lamp as shown here, 2) a DMX master controlling led strips that are connected to a DMX receiver and 3) a Philips LivingColor Gen1).
The Jeenode is build in box, which fits the Jeenode, dimmerplug, 4 Mosfets and some other components. The box, without Jeenode and dimmerplug:
and once the box is closed it looks like this:
The box is mounted in the base of the lamp, as seen in the picture below.
Some impressions of the modified lamp (the led strips are visible on the picture, but not in real-life):
Geert-Jan
