LiFi Pi Lamp

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Hey,

Hope all of you are in great health.

I am an undergraduate student pursuing engineering majoring in electronics and telecommunications. While I love my subjects there is nothing that helps me learn better than reverse engineering devices. This month's theme was perfect to show off my retrofitting experiments. I come from a sustainable living obsessed family and hence recycling and upcycling things is second nature to me. Adding to this, I have been playing around with Li-fi applcations for a while now, and I love how simply one can start implementing it in their houses and so I have tried to add that here as well.

So what did I recycle? I started with the bluetooth speakers that I had opened a while to understand the circuitry and hopefully reuse soon. I was planning to redo the bluetooth wiring but then I realised we could use a pi, so I replaced the bluetooth part of the speaker with pi and the speaker was replaced by leds on the lamp, and the speaker has been connected to solar panels.

So this is the first iteration of what I want to finally implement. For ease of explaination I have used a speaker which already has a powered amplifier circuit, in my final implmentation I will deploy my own amplifier circuit

Here's an explanation of the project by breaking down the blocks.

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So as you can see there are 3 seperate blocks, one is the music player, that is our phone or laptop which can be connected over the Ip network to our pi, which is another circuit that is transmitting music over leds, and our speaker is the last unit which will receive the music via a solar panel or an led diode.

Here is how you can go about making this yourself:

1. Getting all your materials together
   1. Leds, the more the wattage the better
   2. Raspberry pi(any model should do)
   3. micro SD card and its adapter(to interface with the computer)
   4. Laptop with SD Card formatter and an sd card etching software
   5. Audio output cable for raspberry pi(we will be using the pi audio output port
   6. Volumio image for raspberry pi
   7. Speakers (I am recycling and retrofitting this)
   8. A lamp base, this can be anything from just one old glass bottle, mason jar, etc..
   9. Solar Panels
   10. Jumbers, strings, crocodile clips, soldering iron dc power sources(Adapter and/or batteries)
2. Setting up your pi
   1. Start by downloading the volumio image
   2. Insert your sd card into your computer and format it)
   3. Use the etching software to flash it with the image we just downloaded.
   4. Once the sd card is flashed, you can insert it into pi and power it on.
   5. Once you power it on, in a couple of minutes a volumio hotspot should show up on your available networks list.
   6. Connect to the hotspot, the default password for it is <volumio2>.
   7. This will take to the volumio setup where you can connect to your home network and make all the basic settings.
   8. Once connected you can go to volumio.local or if that doesn't work for you(didn't for me), you can run an ip scan and directly type in the ip of the pi in your web browser.
   9. This ip will let you make an account and help you set up different plugins like spotify and one drive music to play device wirelessly.
3. Setting up your lifi circuit
   1. So what we will be basically doing is, putting our audio output in series with our led and the dc power of the led, so the led's brightness(intensity) will change as per the audio signal.
   2. So solder the led in series with the dc input and the audio output.

    4. Spekers

            1. The speakers input should be connected to the solar panel, that is, the left and right input should go to the positive of the solar panel and the ground should go to the negative.

Congratulations, you are almost done!

Now connect the audio output of the pi to your series circuit, play a track from your volumio and face the solar panel towards the led in the pi circuit. You should be able to hear your tracks. Once you know how the output is, you can play around with the number and wattage of leds to make the sound better, even make the solar panel bigger.

I will post an update regarding this soon.