Trilight

This is project was made for my ‘Teknologi B’ exam. Trilight is a small table lamp made from an arduino and a bunch of knockoff NeoPixels.

The idea behind Trillight is to make a lamp with dynamic color temperature. In the eye a hormone called melatonin is made, which makes us sleepy. Melatonin production is blocked by blue light, which in the daytime is produced by the sun. A growing problem for for modern society is the increased usage of technology emitting blue light, especially flourescent and LED light sources. Many people have problems sleeping, as they are subjected to blue light in the evening and night, and therefore don’t produce any melatonin. For computer and phone screens tools like f.lux have existed for quite some years now, but besides the very expensive Phillips Hue lamps, the same didn’t seem to exist for normal lighting. That’s what i aimed to fix with the project.

The lamp is connected to power over mini-usb. The brightness can be adjusted and light turned on and off with two capacitive touch sensors on the base and top of the lamp. The lamp has an inbuilt clock and cycles between preset night/day color temperatures in intervals around set times. The time can be set and options changed using a small python script.

Source code and designfiles can be found the Github repo along with a simple guide on how to build one. If you for some reason want to take a look at the report I made during the project, I’ve uploaded it here. It’s in danish btw.