We built a touchless switch for LIFX bulbs using a Hover and Spark Core. Instead of having to rely on the smartphone to change colors, we can simply wave our hand to control the LIFX bulb. We used sparknode and the lifx node.js packages. The full tutorial is available here.
To learn more about Hover, see here. Hover lets you add touchless gestures to hardware projects.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the project. Does anyone here use LIFX bulbs in their home or office? If you have any questions, let me know!
Depending on how extensively you’d like to use the Hover functionality, you might be able to get away with a capacitive sensor. There’s some neat information on this topic about that: http://community.spark.io/t/include-capacitivesensor-library/2965
It would contain fewer options like the swiping, but you could compensate for that by creating different patterns. That way you could Morse-code your light-bulbs to do the things you’d like it to do. Although you’d have to sacrifice on the cool-ness factor of the Hover, you could customize it to your liking at a lower price point. Just an idea though…
As an addition you can add brightness control, when you move your hand right, the brightness increases and when you move left brightness decreases or something like. Now I thing the color is changing on left/right movement.
I don’t have Hover so I couldn’t include this in my LIFX project, instead I used Web Page.
This is a great project and I have found the Microchip MGC3130 for $5 locally so I might just make my own PCB for this. Being the hardware hacker I am and the fact shipping to here is horrendous, using DFRobot PCB service I should be able to build a few for the price of 1 hover and maybe even include the Spark Core and power input on the same PCB
