The Ultimate Mood Lighting Setup

Recently I've gotten tired of my relatively mundane single light source for my room, an older circular fluorescent tube light that flickers when it turns on, and is much bright to use for a midnight snack. Taking inspiration from a number of sources, I began to devise a solution, LED. Instant turn on, dimmable and low power draw. Some are even available in RGB, for disco time maybe? I saw many designs on the internet and this one particular has a particularly good use of backlighting in my own opinion.

I definitely liked the idea of light strips that aren't visible. Without a piercing strip of lighting in your face the underglow makes the furniture look as if it's almost floating, and I think it's that part of the lighting that I wanted to capture with the mounting of the lights.

To start it all off i purchased a single 5m strip of 5050 waterproof LEDs for the desk. 

Mounting outwards to let the light shine around the room was good for late night navigation after using the desktop while the lights are out, but I couldn't stop there.

The next step was a strip along the back of the desk to shine onto the wall. Although it can be too bright, it's easily the coolest implementation of led light strips in the room. The obvious next step was underglow for the bed. I achieved my desired effect by soldering a 4 core connecter between two long strips to go completely around the bedframe. 

The shelves required a similar method of joining smaller strips by wires. A 4 core cable connects each strip to the last, which would be impossible without cutting and soldering as the wires are much easier to bend and do not draw power where lighting is not needed. 

The last step for light placement was the cupboard. two strips across the back of the clothes hanging rail and the top shelf of my drawers throws enough light around most of the cupboard.

The only challenge left was physical human interface design. The Bluetooth controllers included were fine for most scenarios, but require a mobile phone to turn off and on, making it less than ideal for quick usage. The cupboard lights are powered by battery, so a Bluetooth controller would be unacceptable as it draws current even when the lights are inactive. For the cupboard, i designed a simple battery box and light switch with a voltmeter to remind me when the battery needs charging. Due to the absence of mains power, the battery was a must, and the voltmeter effectively reduces my chances of over discharge, all in a handy display with a professional looking switch.

The PC lights were the least complicated to power. Due to the motherboard rgb header cables, not even soldering was required to install the lighting. Simply plug and play, although these lights are not controllable by Bluetooth at this stage, and instead are controlled by software. 

The bed and shelf lights are incredibly useful to glide weary feet into bed at night, although originally they were powered by a switch located at the rear of the bed and underneath, requiring a long reach down under the bed, potentially allowing a boogie monster to snatch my hand. This of course, was unacceptable. I needed a switch that could be operated without a phone, was easily reachable in the dark and ideally it needed a low power draw when not in use, a simple 12V switch after the transformer would not be okay as the power brick heats up quite a bit even when not in use.

This was the end solution, a capacitance based switch that when touched by a human hand would power a 12V transformer that would then power the lights. Although originally i wanted the entire headrest of the bed to be the touch point, metal tapes look ugly, and i couldn't find an elegant solution to make the wooden surface conductive, so instead the touch pad is a small metal square that is glued to the top corner of the bedframe. It almost looks like a CPU.

And that's it. The full RGB setup for better lighting than the old fashioned fluro bulb, certainly much nicer on the eyes too.