My mom has a miniature elf house that she takes out every Christmas, and it has become a tradition that all her grandkids partake in the elves moving in. She has tried to mount lights in it before, using a battery powered LED strip, but the lights turned out too bright, and the light was pretty cold. So I ordered some orange flickering candle-like LEDs from eBay and got to work 🙂

I’ve wanted to use an ESP8266 WiFi module in a project for some time now, and after reading about the WeMos board, I figured this was the easiest way to get started. The WeMos D1 mini is quite small and much easier to interact with and program than the ESP8266 devices. So I built this single relay controller, with internal temperature reporting. I am communicating with it using MQTT, which makes it really easy to implement it into things like Home Assistant.

This project is an improvement to my previous Lync status light, built back in May 2016. It worked fine, but it only had three 5 mm LEDs. People who knew about the module noticed, but many people didn’t, so it did not have the effect I was looking for. That’s why I decided to upgrade it, and this time use bigger and brighter lights!

A while back my kids got this SOS station toy, it came with a few emergency cars and the boys quite liked it. My girl friend and myself however; hated it, it had a speaker and made a high siren sound and an annoying voice would shout things like “all cars respond”. So I modified it; ripped out the speaker and mounted a few LEDs instead, so now it flashes but no sound.

Bias lighting is, simply put, to light up the wall behind a monitor or TV. It creates a glow around the screen and, supposedly, creates a more comfortable and high contrast viewing experience. I made my bias lighting by merely sticking a LED-strip behind the TV.