ambient lighting system
LIGHTING DESIGN
🛠: Processing, Arduino, OpenCV, Python, Rhinoceros, Adobe Illustrator, Photography, Videography.
🙇♂️: Robert Stuart-Smith, Director of Robert Stuart-Smith Design/Kokkugia & the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab: UPENN
💵: CURF Penn Undergraduate Research Mentorship Grant
⌛: 4 months
THE FUTURE OF SMART LIGHTING
What does the future of smart lighting look like?
Myself and a team of interdisciplinary architecture students sought to explore this question in the context of the design and construction of a peer-to-peer (P2P) sustainable tiny house created from robotic manufacturing and building methods.
The tiny house is designed to be used for 5-7 days and be entirely self-sustaining and mobile, featuring sleek, computer-generated curvatures created through parametric design in Grasshopper for Rhinoceros. Possible users include professionals who must travel on a week-to-week basis or routine travelers looking for a place to stay without committing to one stationary location.
We realized we wanted to explore creating a lighting system that is intuitive, connected to user behavior and appliances, all while accentuating the curvature of the home and incorporating the environment outside indoors.
THE FOUR MODES
1. Ambient Lighting
One key feature of the lighting system is ambient lighting, or the ability to bring the brightness and color of outdoor environments indoors. Because the tiny house is constantly moving and there is an increasing need for healthy lighting during travel and spending time indoors, I devised a system that maps outdoor color onto the indoor LEDs. It uses cameras placed near windows in the tiny house, constantly averaging the color and brightness of the environment outside and then mapping the color to an RGB value that is then displayed on the LEDs.
2. Appliance Connectivity
Another goal of the project was to connect the lights to appliances in the home and kitchen. For example, when the coffee machine is done brewing coffee or the laundry machine is done washing clothes, a red LED will transition to green.
3. Entertainment Lighting
The user can also signify when they would like to use lights for music or entertainment using the party mode presets. I created an algorithm that changes the color of the lights when playing music of different frequencies.
4. Gesture-Based Lighting
Hoping to create an intuitive lighting system, we imagined the user would swipe left and right with their arms in front of camera sensors located throughout the home to control color and swipe up and down to control brightness. This was done using OpenCV for Processing.
