Smart LED Lamp

Project Overview

I’ve had an old lamp sitting on my desk that I’ve kept because I liked how it looked. It used a halogen bulb, which used up a lot of energy and as a result, got very hot and was very much a fire hazard. Due to this scenario, I found an opportunity to create an electrical internet of things project by converting the lamp into a voice-controlled smart LED lamp. I began by taking apart the lamp and removing the pieces that were specifically designed to hold the halogen bulb. This left me with just two wires coming out of the lamp legs and I got out a digital multimeter to do some reverse-engineering and figure out what kind of power I would be dealing with from these wires. I found out that the lamp basically did nothing to transform the power that it was receiving from the wall plug before sending it through the bulb, so I grabbed a power relay with wifi control and a power converter that stepped down the 120 VAC input to a 12V DC ouput with a 1.2A current limit, which would be safe for an LED strip. With a little soldering, I chained together the relay, power converter, and a remotely configurable LED strip to create the new lamp hardware. After packing all the electronics into the lamp I now have a new remotely configurable LED lamp, where the wifi power relay allows me to control the lamp through my phone or a smart-home device like the Amazon Echo.