One of our coworkers, Vitaliy, enjoys creating cool things to make his home and workplace just a bit more fun. This time he put his heart and soul into making hardware and software for controlling his home lights! Cool isn’t it?
Well, here is how this happened. First things first, he bought a Raspberry pie, which is basically a small computer one can use for controlling minor processes. His next step was writing a piece of code on the C language, which would listen to the UDP port and give out data through the GPIO. He also wrote am Andoid application which sends commands to the UDP port on Raspberry. Most important and fun part of this experiment, was making the hardware which received the trasnmitted data and controlled every single light balb installed.
Controlling the lights from outside of the appartment has become possible when the web client was created. This means that he can go to the desktop browser and turn the lights off/on, while being away from home. And what is more interesting, is that any kind of the of the client on any platfrom can be created to control these lights.
Follow the link to see how his invention works in life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF3DCkvE2LY