Video: LED Stair Lighting Hack with Raspberry Pi

We never fail to be amazed by the ingenuity and skills of smart home hackers and we’ve been following Robert Hekkers’ Staircase Lighting project since last September.

Now the project is finished and the 12 LED strips, IR light barriers, 16-channel LED driver, and Arduino / Raspberry Pi controls are all in place.  Check out the video below for some awesome automated LED stair lighting action…

So how does this contraption work? The Raspberry Pi that’s near the Arduino runs a Node.JS script. This script basically controls the ‘state’ in which the Arduino is. With the serialport module this Node script can send commands to the Arduino like ‘reset’, ‘on’, ‘off’, ‘day’, ‘night’, ‘demo’, ‘stop’.

The reset command triggers a ‘reboot’ of the Arduino by jumping to address 0. The on/off commands are used to tell the Arduino whether it should act on the light barriers being broken or not, day and night tell the Arduino whether it’s day or night in our world (which has it’s effect on the brightness of the LED strips), and the demo command… well, you can do amazing stuff with 13 individual LED strips!

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You can follow Robert’s 6 part series on how he built the system starting at part 1 here.