- Personal project
- I designed and built twin lamps to share a bit of presence in my long-distance relationship.
- The lamp uses an Arduino to control the LED matrix, receive touch input and send data to an MQTT broker.
For a few years now, I have been living the long-distance relationship life which has given us some challenges. Fortunately, we live in a day and age where we can still talk and see each other every day through digital means, but it’s definitely lacking. The physical dimension is missing and you’re not really there in the room together. So, I decided to try to tackle it as a designer.
The result was the twin IoT lamps that I built. It allows us to share our presence to the other by touching the lamp. When one lamp is touched, both change in colour making the receiver aware of the presence of the other.
For the brain, I used an Arduino Nano IoT and connected it with a WS2812b LED matrix. The button was a touch-capacitive sensor using tin foil hidden underneath the plastic top. The wooden and plastic parts were laser cut. The two lamps communicated to each other using the MQTT protocol
