EPIC: Smarter Lighting 🧠 💡

[nelsonic]

Context

At present the communal areas of the house have PIR (Passive infrared) sensors which activate very bright lights.
This is undesirable because it's the same intensity regardless of ambient lighting or time of day.

It means people are bombarded with bright lights when they are brushing their teeth in the evening
or just walking from the Play Room or Library to their bed. 👎

See feedback in #314

Story

As a person who suffers from migraines when exposed to intense light,
I want to not be exposed to high brightness light just before bed time
So that I can reduce my insomnia due to headaches.

This is a legit pain point for someone we know. 💡 🤯
An it's widely known that bright light in the evening is bad for disruption of circadian rhythm. 😞

Plan

1. Setup an ESP32 with PIR sensor and LED on the Electronics Workbench (T1h) - we already have all the components in our Electronics cupboard, we just need the space & time to start this!
2. Get the most basic version working without anything fancy. (T2h)
3. Log PIR activation events to stdout (T25m)
4. Log data to a "server" (Raspberry Pi) on the same WiFi Network (T2h) - save data in a log file (one entry per event) that can be imported into Postgres for analysis.
5. Study how to package and power the assembly for "production" use. (T4h)

Motion sensor in ESPHome and Home Assistant: https://youtu.be/opUb_FG1BPE

Packaging the assembly for production use can just mean buying an off-the-shelf case or printing from Thingverse
https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/vhlsga/where_do_people_get_esp32_cases_from/
e.g: https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=esp32

The beauty of this is that we don't have to start from zero, we can borrow someone else's 3D model as a starting point.
We want to integrate the PIR sensor into the case and ideally have an inline power supply so we don't have to deploy a "brick" for each ESP32 where we want to have smart lighting.

Thankfully, the power supply for an ESP32 is a solved problem and we can buy the component for cheap:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005110830688.html

All-in the components will cost around €12 per "zone" of the house and will allow us to do our own smart lighting and monitoring.

6. 3D-print the enclosure. T4h
7. Deploy the first unit and start collecting data T2h - I suggest we deploy in the entrance above the fish tank as there is a lot of space and is low risk if anything fails.
8. Collect data on usage, both automatically (see #4 above) and from the people in the house. T25m
9. Integrate feedback into subsequent iterations TBD
10. Edit and Publish Video of the process!

As you can see from adding all the (rough) time estimates add up to more than a day.
I would actually budget a full week for this so that we can film it and release a video.

Note: We do not want to buy off-the-shelf (e.g: Philips Hue) lights for this because they are Closed Source and will not allow us to learn from the data collected.

P.S. This issue will be expanded with more detail when we proceed with this mini-project.
e.g: We would like to include a Photoresistor in the assembly to monitor the ambient light, that may or may not be part of V1 but will be useful to either crank up the output or lower it. TBD.