Lighting Controller

A home kiosk app

In my house I like a lot of colored lights. It makes it fun when I drop screws for IKEA furniture, and I cannot see them. Unironically I just love the vibes - being able to change the color of a room and feel a new energy, see the spaces in my home in a new way on demand. Plus, practically, it is easy to dim a wifi lightbulb vs installing physical dimmers where I might enjoy them.

One of the issues that results from this is that my family and I can control the lighting arbitrarily on Google home - but any contractors, guests, or other parties I do not care to add to my Google Family account cannot alter lighting for their convenience. One day I was thinking about this and I said “let me timebox this to an hour and see what I can build.”

The result of that was this little light controller app. I built it in Python with Kivy (and KivyMD for some ease on my eyes). I have used Kivy with my students before because it allows for several nice features:

1. It is cross platform - I can build the app on a Mac and run it on any Android device EG
2. It is easy to build a UI and keep “business” logic separate
3. It’s super fast to build very basic things that look decent

I built the application in under an hour and it worked great. My MVP goals were to make a button to toggle the lights to all white, saving their last known color to have it reset on toggle; and to allow for switching lights on or off. It also had to be installable on a little Amazon fire tablet I had spare, so that guests could control lighting without a ton of extra fuss.

Public GH Repo is here. It doesn’t work functionally like it used to because this is older code and I only have since made it run to allow for display :)