Wi-Fi DIODER: Light controls on your smartphone

Overview

Materials: DIODER, WyLight board, soldering iron, small side cutter

Description: Some month ago colored LED strips got popular in Germany and somehow one of these stripes ended up on our desk. It was a nice idea to have colored light at home but something was weird with these strips. All of them are controlled by an IR remote. This might be a cheap solution for the LED companys, but we wanted something more elegant. So we thought, why not just use our Smartphones? So we build a small circuit board with Wi-Fi onboard, connected it to the LED strip and wrote an iPhone app for it. Now, we were able to choose full 24 bit RGB colors, program self running scripts into the strip and do all this from our phones, even if we are not at home.

Then we discovered DIODER at our local IKEA and got curious on its inner workings. Still in the car on our way home we opened the control and saw that it might be easy to replace the original circuit board with our own. No sooner said than done we replaced the board in less than 20 minutes and can now control our DIODER from anywhere in the house. Use it to wake us up with a sunrise and even group multiple DIODER to enlighten us simultaneously.

If you like to try the same here is how we’ve done it:

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1. Open the case of the DIODER. It is held by 4 clips.

 

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2. Remember the color encoding of the wires or simply take a snapshot. IKEA might change the encoding silently. Be careful if your DIODER circuit boards looks different, too. Then unsolder the wires from the DIODER pcb.

 

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3. Solder the +12V and ground wires to the WyLight pcb. Then connect the led_red, led_green and led_blue wires to the connectors. Now, check if everything is working as expected. Use the WyLight app to connect to the DIODER and test it.

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5. To better fit with the WyLight pcb, remove the retainer in the top case as seen in the snapshots. With the retainer removed the case should close more easy.

6. Have fun!

 

You like our idea and can’t wait to build your own WyLight board? Then get the circuit diagram, layout and bill of materials from our open source repository at GitHub and start soldering.

Soldering is not your thing but you want a Wi-Fi DIODER? Then contact us at ikea@wylight.de to purchase a ready to use board or Wi-Fi DIODER directly from us.