PSoC 4: Bluetooth Controlled LED Chandelier

The Chandelier Thing!

We have had this old plastic chandelier for more than a decade, which was originally for incandescent lamps. The oldie used to consume up to 500 watts worth of power, therefore we didn’t use it very often. I had a few meters of white LED strip laying around. So, I decided to upgrade the chandelier.

Since the LED stripe requires 12 Volts and 1.2 Amperes of current/meter length to drive, a good option is to use Desktop computers ATX Power Supply which was also laying around in the junks.

This is a very common project done with many microcontroller platforms. All you need is a BT-UART wireless link and send some UART characters over the air as a command. The micro will respond to perform necessary action.

Few meters of wire (those thick Speaker wires) is used to route the power form one room (where the ATX supply + controller/BT module/Relay resides) to the dining room where the Chandelier is hanging.

Works with any Bluetooth-Serial App

There are many Apps out there for Bluetooth-Serial terminal mainly developed for Arduino Bluetooth application. The code I wrote there is very simple, it simply toggles the Light driving signal whenever anything comes over serial. This is what makes it universally supported by any Bluetooth app.

Of course you can make your own app on MIT app inventor with proper encoding but why bother? It's just one single lamp !

Note: By the way, the NXP app is something I made for Kinetis K82 Freedom Board and the other app was made by some guy named TechBitar for Arduino!

ATX Power Sypply

Old Desktop PC’s ATX power supplies are a very good source for heavy duty high current applications, ATX has all the voltage rails those are most frequently used in projects, these are 3.3V, 5V and 12V.

• Black wires are Ground

• Yellow wires are +12 Volts

• Red wires are +5 Volts

There is a green wire which must be kept pulled down (shorted to ground) to keep the supply on.

SCB-UART Configuration

Inside PSoC Creator a SCB (Hardware) UART component is dragged and configured with the most frequently used UART setting as follows:

Pins are connected as follows:

USB Dock for 5V

An USB Type-A receptacle is connected to the 5 volts rails of the ATX, then the CY8CKIT-049 is docked into it for power. There is a tiny breadboard which routes the power to Bluetooth Module and the Light Powering Relay Module.