My brother is currently transforming an old public transport bus in to a house, and wants to light everything with led strips. He asked me to design a system that could do the following:

1. Push a light switch shortly, and the lights should toggle
2. Push and hold a light and the light should start dimming until you release the switch
3. There should be a wake up light mode

The hardware

As most of my projects the board is built around an atmega8 — The are just so dirt cheap, and the arduino boot loader allows other people to thinker with the software later on. The inputs are fed through a bank of optocouplers to eliminate EMI, and at the outputs there are a bunch of mosfets to directly drive the led strips. The board was milled in fablab Brussels.

A crappy shot of the populated board.

The software

To enable the wake up light mode: send a pulse to the wake up light pin, the selected led strips will than start to slowly fade. Apart from the requested features I added some more: 1. An all of pin: send a pulse to this pin, and all lights are turned off 2. A party mode pin: send a pulse to this pin, and all lights start to hysterically flicker

Status

2014-08-15: The system is ready and awaiting installation. After the installation the software will be tweaked a bit.

More info

The software and schematics are on github