Over a year ago, I got so frustrated with photocell controlled lighting the could not tell the difference between day and night that I decided to do something about it and put together a project using a Raspberry PI (RPi) and a Solid State Relay (SSR) board to automatically turn on/off lights based on accurate calculations to determine sunrise and sunset for a given lat/long (and height) position. The original project controlled 50 watt High Pressure Sodium light fixture(s). It’s been working well for over a year now.
Recently I started using LED lighting - my backyard security light is a ~ 90W equivalent LED bulb that consumes about 9 watts of power. Running an RPi 7x24 that consumed ~ 4.5 watts of power to control a 9 watt LED light does not make sense (today). So enter the Particle Photon and a couple of revisions to the original RPi code and we have a power efficient security light controller! See the autolight-photon project here. My first implementation is actually running in the cloud and using the Particle I/O API to control the light.
I’m interested in knowing if anyone finds the code useful and/or has suggestions on how to improve it.
Al