How I Decided To Make Custom LED Lighting
As soon as you walk into any corporate office, the jarring overhead lighting is immediately off-putting.
Most corporate offices believe that bright overhead lighting promotes productivity and alertness. While both of these are important, the bright overheads also create a bland sense of sterility. Unless you need to work in a sterile laboratory, it’s time to switch off the overhead at least when you’re working from home.
Initially, I started out by purchasing Hue smart bulbs, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
Why Store-Bought Smart-Bulbs Didn’t Work Out
Starting with Hue and ultimately switching to Govee was a great entry into smart lighting and there were a few things I really liked about them:
The lights worked out of the box with minimal setup
I could control them from my smart phone (and later, Alexa)
I could plug the bulbs into existing lights and they worked
Some even came with some animations and color options
However, I also quickly got frustrated with some of the limitations like:
To get the look I wanted, I had to purchase multiple, different types of lights
Often, the lights wouldn’t go exactly where I wanted while also being hidden
and finally, the price tag!
The Solution? Make My Own LED Lighting
Making my own, custom LED lighting was an educational rabbit hole, but I’m so glad I dove in.
I love to learn about new things to make, and lighting was an array of different areas to learn more about. I learned about micro-controllers, how to program them, electronics, and different ways I could integrate lighting into my projects. It was like an entirely new world of possibilities was opened up that I’m still just scratching the surface of.
Learning all of these areas not only opened my eyes to what is possible, but expanded my creativity for what all I wanted to do.
My ultimate goal now is to have fully integrated lighting in my home office.
This would mean that there would not be any visible lights anywhere in my home office. The lighting would be built into things like monitor stands, shelves, bookcases, drawers, etc. The amazing part is with microcontrollers, the lighting can still be changed with physical buttons, but I can also make them work with smart-home devices like Alexa.
The world of smart lighting and integrated lighting is currently my obsession and I want to add them to every project I make now.
What type of lighting would you make if you could create anything?
