Hi all,

I've been thinking of building this project for a while now, but haven't really had the opportunity to start it until recently. After moving into a house, and looking up at the downlights, I looked into different options of controlling them. Philips Hue was the first to pop up. They are amazing lights, but they don't really fit the bill for me. They don't have an MR16 bulb here in Australia, the multiple colours thing is a bit overkill for what I want, they aren't outdoor rated, and they cost an insane amount of money. A few other options popped up as well, but most of them were either very expensive, or simply didn't have the 12v MR16 bulbs that I wanted.

After seeing a significant number of ESP8266 posts pop up on Hackaday, I thought I should get some to play around with. I figured this would be a good starting block for me to work from.

Having very little background in electronics, I am a bit cautious of designing up a first revision of the schematic (even if it is quite simple) and sending it off for fab without building up test boards first. I am assuming that this is fairly commonplace in the industry, however, when I thought of the idea I felt as though it was a bit of a breakthrough for me. Splitting the project up into smallish chunks will hopefully allow me to test each of the individual parts without confusing the daylights out of me. Additionally, for future projects I'll be able to refer back to these and have something that I know has worked for me previously. I can see three different blocks that I should build up so far.

• An ESP8266 breakout
• A switchmode power supply to convert the 12vac from the transformer into something I can use
• The switching circuit for controlling the downlight itself

Time to get cracking!