Our office space has a lot of electronics which means there a lot of different wires devices everywhere. Our LED lights were controlled from a remote and we wanted our space to be 'smart'. Having an Alexa we decided we could link our lights to it and have them voice controlled to set the vibe whether we are doing school work or a personal project.
Our project consists of Amazon Alexa controlled LED strip lights. Commands are said to the Alexa which communicates the one of our particle argon boards. It sends the information through IFTTT (if this then that) to send that information to the other particle argon board which is connected to the LED lights. You can say commands such as “Alexa trigger blue” and the blue LED lights will turn on. You can also say “Alexa trigger party lights” and a variety of colors will cycle through. The blue is connected to A0, green is connected to A1, red is connected to A2, and the power is connected to VSUB on the particle argon board. The other board has no connections but links to the Alexa. If you want to turn the lights off you just have to say “Alexa trigger lights off” and the lights will turn off.
One of the boards has all the color code flashed to it while the other has the communication code that communicates between the two boards.
We decided to buy 5V LED lights as the particle argon boards can power 5V. If you wanted to use a 12V LED strip, you would need a step up device in order to run those. You won't have enough power to run 12V LED lights with this setup.
Above are the pictures of two particle boards. The first picture doesn't have anything connected to it because the board is communicating to the alexa. For the second board it it connected to the 5V led light strips. Look at the schematic for each pin representing what color and how it powers it the light.
For the lights we wanted to see at what time the lights are turning on and off when the Alexa sends the signal to the Argon board. Using 1 for when the board in on and 0 for when the board is of. The purpose of this data is to show us that the board is receiving the signal to switch led lights every time we ask alexa to "trigger (lights)". This also allows us to see many different patterns on how the light is being used and when.
Live Data Spreadsheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_sR64Fbajm3tiwqP43jnqQBMOGIfCI0e1I9SXaJVfuw/edit#gid=0
This Is the IFTTT setup for the Live Data:
Next below are the IFTTT statement example for how the alexa is communicating to the boards. So The IFTTT is first communicating to the boards publishing the event then we would call upon the lights in the real world and the lights would turn on and change colors depending on the trigger. We have done this for every color we used (More colors can easily be added by adding the color you want in the code and then creating the IFTTT statement for the color we want).
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