Mood Lamp Project Part-1

I wanted to build something at the intersection of IoT and home lighting — something you'd actually keep on your desk. The Mood Lamp ended up being a 10 cm circular lamp with 16 RGB LEDs, controlled from your phone over Wi-Fi.

The main component is an Adafruit NeoPixel Ring, 16 x 5050 RGB LEDs, each individually addressable. You push an RGB value to each LED to set the colour. That's what gives you basically infinite color options rather than a fixed set.

For the microcontroller, I went with ESP32. The reason: it has Wi-Fi built in. No extra module, no extra wiring. You flash the code from Arduino IDE via micro USB, connect to your network, and the hardware side is essentially done. Three wires connect the NeoPixel ring to the ESP32: data to GPIO4, 5V to VIN, and ground to ground.

The body is laser-cut acrylic, circular, about 10 cm across. It holds the ring and the ESP32 in place. I had it cut to fit both parts without needing any adhesive.

The phone side runs on BlynkIOT. Blynk gives you a drag-and-drop dashboard with color pickers and sliders linked to the ESP32 over Wi-Fi. No custom app required.

In the next part, I'll cover the software and testing side of it...

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