LED Strip control

Reactive ambient lighting

As fascinated as I am by all kinds of interactive entertaining electronic devices, I could not resist buying 25 meters of RGB LED strips.

To me, these were representing the opportunity to create an infinite number of ambient light applications, from computer or smartphone event notifying to sweet evening dimming and morning wakening light. That said, I focused my work on trying to create a control system that generates an ambient light according to the surrounding acoustic atmosphere, following the progressions of noise and music to give a new visual dimension to the human hearing sense.

In this article, I will highlight the main steps of the long development process I ran through, trying to design the most handy and pleasant system as possible.

• Arduino
  • Analog inputs
  • Python script and serial communication
  • Fast Fourier Transform
• PIC microcontroller
  • Analog inputs
  • UART serial communication
• Android smartphone
  • TCP/IP server socket
  • Bluetooth
  • Embedded Fast Fourier Transform