Professional Android Open Accessory Programming with Arduino

Chapter 10

Kitchen Lamp

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Using extremely long LED strips
• Using high-current power supplies
• Sending notifications to accessories
• Housing your boards
• Bit-banging versus SPI

In this chapter you build a kitchen lamp as an accessory to your Android device. It will be augmenting notifications from your phone (call or SMS arrivals, or the status of a timer) by means of using the light coming from a stripe with 144 full-color LEDs.

This chapter takes you through the process of building a real-life accessory, one that people use every day. We opted for a kitchen lamp, because the kitchen is an environment where it makes a lot of sense to have some sort of hands-free interaction with some of the existing appliances. We also chose a lamp because kitchens are noisy and light seems the most effective way to get feedback from the phone/tablet. We could as well connect the phone’s audio jack to a sound amplifier to listen to any kind of notifications. However, in this case you are going to explore the possibilities offered by light, its intensity and color.

We are positive you have at least one lamp in your kitchen. We hope that looking at how we brought this project to life will trigger your imagination and push you into building something that you will use. You learn the most when you try to fit the device’s behavior to your personal needs.

THE CONCEPT

We did some research looking for possible materials, and we came to the conclusion that it would be interesting to ...