A couple of months ago I picked up cheap WiFi-controlled LED bulbs (one among dozens of very similar devices), after seeing them at a friend’s place.  This turned out to be an excuse to play with the ESP8266, which has inspired several hacks.

I was overall very happy with these bulbs: decent Android and iOS apps and, compared to fancier solutions (e.g., Philips Hue or Belkin WeMo), they do not require any proprietary base stations, and you can’t beat the price!  However, switching off the lights before falling asleep involved hunting for the phone, opening the app, and waiting for it to scan the network; not an ideal user experience.  I was actually missing our old X10 alarm clock controller (remember those?), so I decided to make one from scratch, because… why not?

Although the X10 Powerhouse controller’s faux-wood styling and 7-segment LED had a certain… charm, I decided to go more modern and use a touchscreen.  I also designed a 3D printed enclosure with simple geometric shapes and used it as a further excuse to play with 3D print finishing techniques.  Here is the final result:

And here it is in action:

If this seems interesting, read on for details.  The source code for everything is available on GitHub. Edit: You can also check the Hackaday.io project page for occasional updates.

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