SateLight - A customizable, modular desktop light

Greetings Space-neers.

After completing a janky prototype cobbled together by plastic, off the self modules and some soldering. I had in my hands the proof needed to continue on with creating the first designs for the enclosure and the PCBs.

However there was something at the back of my mind that was bugging me. You see, initially I searched for 5 pin connectors to pass through my power, I2C and Neopixel data. But unfortunately this product seems to not exist. At that point I decided to carry on with Power, 1-Wire and Neo-pixel instead.

The following days I had the first schematic and design ready for a self made 1-Wire light sensor. An Arduino Nano with a LDR (photoresistor) to talk to the ESP. Nonetheless, I was on a path of locking my project away from the community by having complex self made sensor libraries and scarce hardware that people sometimes are not aqcainted with.

So a major change had to be done.

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After some thinking, the decision was made to complicate the LED modules, rather than challenging everyone who would like to take a spin at this project. Diched all PCB designs and created a small air circuit with an arduino nano I had on hand and a strip of neopixel led strip.

After some coding, the ESP could fade in and out the led strip. Though the colors were random because the I2C to SK6812 RGBW bridge would control plain Neo-pixels that are only RGB. The fact that the leds had always the same colors, and they were fading properly, locked in this small prototype.

After also integrating a Temperature Humidity I2C sensor, the time of re-design had come.

Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen of space.

The first days of this project started by remembering a comment on my "SateLight - The Ceiling Light" project, asking to add interlocking modules to create different configurations of the space station. Well, not many people want a whole satellite hanging from the ceiling, and adding the modules would be a one time job only, not to mention balance issues.

Parallel to that I was working on interfacing some 1-Wire sensors at the office, and in the firmware I had created this convoluted way of adding and removing sensors from some system by hotplugingg, the system could periodically discover the sensors and add them or remove them from the logs as needed.

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Sensors that come and go, interlocking modules. Then it hit me! Why not make a modular system to create your own SateLight assemblies? But smaller and nice to play with. 

But how could I make it satisfying? Well, remember these magnetic charging cables for smartphones, yes they are cool, repeatable and have nice snap to them.

I knew my mission.

I bough some round magnetic connectors with 4 pins to test how much weight they could handle. I was worried that shear forces would send this project to an early grave. But to my surprise the manufacturer had already sold this problem by using special geometry on the magnetic connector pair. After using the 3D printer to create some holders/testers for the magnets and playing with them a while. I knew that they could easily hold light electronic modules.

In my excitement I sat and designed the first body iteration of this project, a simple cylindrical enclosure to hold the connectors in place and start testing if I could pass data through them.

After painstakingly connecting wires from the magnets to the ESP (and burning some leds and an ESP at that).

I was able to successfully control a Neo-pixel strip.

Day two was to try and get some light data from a custom 1-Wire sensor that I made using an Arduino Nano and a PhotoResitor. This was also successful.

Finally I could go into this project seriously.