The background bits

The proposal for this roadtest plus was written around the TI TPS92512 which is an LED Driver Buck converter. The idea was to design a 4Channel Lighting solution along with a variety of LED panels. In addition to RGB Lighting Panels, it was proposed that custom ones can be made using special LEDs for agricultural lighting more commonly known as ‘Grow Lights’. Additionally, the control over the colour as well as intensity of the lights should be controllable over say Wi-Fi which can be accomplished by using a CC3200. The system is to be designed in an enclosure that can replace the conventional home or industrial lighting hence the title “Multipurpose Modular Light Bar Project”.

In the previous posts, I have gone through the unboxing of the kit, explaining the idea in detail and setting up the CC3200. In this post, I just want to provide a quick update to the UI side of my project.

The face that sailed a thousand ships

The user interface is one of the most important parts of any project. If its beautiful, everyone will want one and hence I set to work on the GUI part of my project. The original intent was to create a web based app so that the light can be controlled via PC, phone or tablet. I usually use OpenHAB but since this is a modular system and unlike Phillips HUEs which needs a gateway, I wanted to make something independent. Hence the user interface had to work from somewhere else and BTLE has been done and provided by Texas Instruments in the kit itself. My modular light has a lot more power and capability and hence it deserves something more.

Since I am an expecting father, my wife came to me with a practical problem- We need dimmable lighting so that we may use the same light as a night light as well. I wanted to monitor the temperature of the baby room as well and log it. So now I have a very practical scenario where my design will be implemented. The GUI needs to accomodate a lot of things and I need some future expandability. I searched the internet and downloaded some bootstrap based dashboard themes. I am an electronics engineers who has a degree in ASIC design/FPGAs and designs embedded systems while doing a PhD on microwave Ceramics and teaches Artificial Neural Networks... i.e. I have no formal education in web design so templates are a really a great place to start.

I read, googled, tested and drank a lot of coffee and came up with this...

OK i admit the whole thing is still in the initial phases but hey it works! The responsive GUI works for all display sizes and you can resize the browser to see it re-organize itself. I will be pushing data into the tables and graphs after I am done with setting up some basic user access control.

Click on the Baby Room and ...

The system connects via MQTT to our CC3200 Launchpad and queries for the current value of brightness. If it is running, it will respond with an value. You may press any button to turn ON, OFF or DIM and BRIGHTEN the lamp. It works pretty well actually.

The demo

So yes you can access my dashboard at http://inderpreet.github.io/HomeAutomationUI/ Use http and not https because of the issues with certificates.

I shared the link via twitter to followers via twitter.com/ip_v1 and very soon I had to shut it down because someone started playing with the buttons. I am going to implement the Access Control next along with the temperature sensor and graphs.

For the final demo I am hoping to setup a live stream so that anyone can connect and control the system remotely and see the implementation live.

Thank everyone.

Cheers,

IP