I wanted to be able to dim the room lighting automatically so that sunrise and sunset sequences could be done smoothly. Until now I had to manually adjust the dimmers of three lighting circuits which was somewhat tricky.
Purchasing digitally controlled lighting would have been prohibitively expensive and furthermore I was not prepared to remove the existing LED strips from the ceiling above the layout. I decided to implement digital access to the lighting by adding electronics where the existing lights obtained their power and were controlled by the dimmers.
I have four circuits:
- Warm white ceiling lights - drawing about 3.5 Amps at full power.
- Cool white ceiling lights - drawing about 5 Amps at full power.
- Mountain backdrop lights - drawing about 2.7 Amps at full power.
- Hidden area lighting - on/off - which draws about 3 Amps.
I decided to use an ESP8266 NodeMCU processor to control the lights. This is a small processor about 1" x 2" in size and can be bought for less than $5. It is capable of connecting to WiFi and has a number of outputs that can be used for the lighting, but these outputs are only 3.3V and only capable of 12mA, so those logical level outputs had to be fed to some components that amplify the signals and drive the high current load of all the lights.
I also found some technology called Blynk which includes the ability to easily create an app that runs on mobile devices and can 'talk' to the ESP8266, thus providing a handy visual interface to control the lights. Here is what my Blynk app for the lights looks like:
