Daylight

Inspiration

Our team uses the iPhone night mode because we find the lack of blue light calming when trying to go to bed. This got us thinking about the relationship between our schedules and the lights in our environments. It would be nice if your light knew your schedule and changed color to best match your needs. Heck, if the light knows your schedule, why can't it also remind you of your events?

What it does

Daylight is an Internet-connected light that changes its color and pattern according to your Google Calendar schedule. For the thirty minutes before your first event of the day, Daylight emits a bluish light to help you wake up and stay alert. Then, for the three minutes immediately preceding any event, Daylight will flash between different colors as an event reminder. Daylight will emit green light to indicate that you have an event happening right now or yellow light to indicate that you don't. Finally, once all of your daily events are complete, Daylight will transition to a soft red to suggest that you can relax and get ready to sleep.

How we built it

Daylight is constructed from a Raspberry Pi and a set of LEDs. Once it's connected to the internet, the Pi downloads your Google Calendar as an ICS file and uses an open-source library to parse the events. Then, Daylight updates its LEDs to match your schedule. We also added a simple web dashboard to the Pi that allows you to set the calendar URL and change the current time.

Challenges we ran into

We built Daylight with odds and ends that we borrowed from our school's chapter of IEEE. Therefore, not all of our parts were entirely functional or documented. Our Raspberry Pi that we used had an old version of Python installed that was incompatible with many of the packages we wanted to use and prohibitively difficult to replace. Also, our LEDs were unlabelled, and that forced us to use trial and error to find good resistors to pair with them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did a good job in the early planning portion of this project. We quickly found a project that fit the theme, was manageable in the time allowed, and suited the strengths of each group member.

What we learned

We all learned a lot about RGB LEDs and their various terminals and styles.

What's next for Daylight

Stepping up from small LED lights to full-size lightbulbs could allow Daylight to function in lamps or even ceiling fixtures.

We are submitting this project to the mental health competition track.

Built With

• flask
• ics
• leds
• pwm
• python
• raspberry-pi
• requests