Our entire Lab now has internet accessible smart room lights!! New technology here we come! We have found freely accessible online python software to hack together new ways of visualizing science through the medium of lights in the room. What wonderful science projects can you imagine that we can convert to multicolor lights?
As promised, we will not be afraid to highlight our failings – and this is our first in the Innovation Lab. We struggled to get a raspberry pi to register with a hub lighting system – But hope is not lost yet!
We have a variety of products that are all LED multi-color and dimmable. From smart lights to portable smart table lights and ambiance light strips. By using simple python software package, we can now develop new methods to communicate science and engineering via the lighting in the room. With access to the internet, we can also access live NASA science data to affect the room.
So come join us as we hack together new software to visualize data. What ideas do you have? Show us how you tested smart lights? Tell us what NASA science and engineering data most excites you and how you think we should prototype the data into lights for the room?
Currently, I have hit our first serious stumbling block to our cool ideas from the Innovation Lab. I could not register a raspberry pi to the Hue hub: –
For coding our lights, I decided to use a raspberry pi as a cheap and practical solution that everyone can contribute and learn. However, I have been having serious difficulties in registering the pi to our hue hub, which would then allow me to send commands to change color. Registering a new device should be simple, and it has worked easily with the phone apps for the lights. But using an ‘ssh’ terminal command does not appear to work…. if anyone has any suggestions of how they connected – let us know!
Once I can register the pi, simple python codes can be used to scrape [coding jargon for finding and taking information from the web] real-time NASA data to make the room changes color. Including flashing the lights for NASA launches 🙂 – I can’t wait to get the pi working!