I’ve posted a project up to hackaday.io and submitted it to the hack a day prize competition. Its something I’ve been working for a while (fairly slowly) its title for the purposes of the hack a day competition is “Wireless Smarthome Buttons” but that name is less than ideal and I really need a better one. Anyway ..

It’s a wireless 2x2 button pad backlit by RGB LED’s, it can be used for controlling any other connected device or project. However my intended usage is controlling smart home devices.

Firmware on the device is pretty simple it uses the MQTT protocol and publishes the press of the buttons to MQTT topics and subscribes to other topics that tells it what colour the LED’s should be. This way the the press of the buttons is disconnected from the illumination of the LED’s. This separation takes its inspiration from the Monome project. The most obvious use case here is the LED’s can be used for notifications as well as indicating button presses or device states.

In the current version the backend is run by some Python code on a Raspberry Pi. I’m currently controlling Lifx lamps using the magicmonkey NoteJS MQTT bridge but I’m thinking of writing my own Lifx MQTT bridge in Ruby.

I’ll be publishing more details and code in the coming weeks to my project on hackaday projects. Check it out.