Guy Dupont Wins “Best Dad” Award for Building This Unique Colorful Light Solution for His Daughter
Guy Dupont built this unique marker-based system to let his young daughter control the color of the lights in her room.
User interaction design is a field of study and profession with a lot of depth, resulting in wildly different interfaces and control schemes depending on the desired user behavior. That can even be nefarious, with intentionally frustrating designs implemented to steer users away from certain actions (try canceling a subscription, for example). Classic user interaction design, however, is all about user friendliness and that hinges on intuitive control. When Guy Dupont wanted to give his daughter the ability to control the lights in her room, he leaned into that philosophy to build this unique marker-based solution.
Dupont’s daughter is young, but she knows her colors and associates them with markers. For most kids, markers and colors are intrinsically linked, so they provide the potential for a very intuitive color selection system.
If one were developing, say, an app to control an RGB LED lightbulb and expected adults to be the primary users, it might make sense to use a color wheel. Heck, if the intended audience is graphic designers, you might even have a field for entering hex codes. But Dupont’s daughter hasn’t yet memorized all of the hex codes for her favorite colors, so this marker system is better.
It works like this: she decides she wants the lights in her room to be purple. So, she grabs a purple marker from her bin. She then taps the cap of that marker to a small device mounted within reach on a piece of furniture. The system identifies the marker and then sets the lighting to the matching color. It really couldn’t be any more intuitive.
This relies on two key components: an M5Stack NanoC6 Dev Kit and an M5Stack RFID 2 Unit. Both are very affordable and the NanoC6 Dev Kit is a self-contained device containing an ESP32-C6 microcontroller in an enclosure with a button, a handy Grove connector, and LEDs (Infrared and WS2812B). The Grove connector makes attaching the RFID 2 Unit really easy. It has a WS1850S RFID reader chip and works with common 13.56MHz RFID tags.
Those tags are cheap and available in all kinds of form factors. In this case, Dupont used thin, flexible sticker tags that he could place on the marker caps. When the ESP32 detects a tag, it communicates with Dupont’s Home Assistant server via WiFi, telling it to set the lights in his daughter’s room to the color associated with that particular tag.
As some commenters pointed out, it would have been possible to use a color sensor instead of RFID. That would have worked with any object, without the need for the placement of RFID tags ahead of time. But Dupont chose this method, because he can expand it to control other things in the future.
