Internet-enabled children's nightlight

Powered by Node.JS and a variety of types of internet-controllable lights, such as:

• Philips Hue
• NeoPixel & ESP8266

Why Does This Exist?

I wanted my kids to have a nightlight in their room that:

• Had programmable color & brightness
• Had an adjustable timer (turns off X minutes after being turned on)
• Had an interface to show history of button pushes (so I can see when they were awake)
• Schedule the light to change color on a schedule (so at 7am it turns to blue to indicate "Ok, it's morning time!"). This is great for sleep training!

Other Great Uses

• Our kitchen lightstrips now turn on at 9pm, and off at 7am, to provide a great evening ambience.

Live Demos

Demo of button turning light on

Demo of button turning light off

What Does This Do?

There is a Node.js web server that runs on the network, connects to the Philips Hue bridge, and listens on the network for some button to get pushed.

Each button gets associated with a light on the network. If the button is pushed and the light is off - the light is turned on (and a timer is started to automatically turn the light off after X minutes). If the button is pushed and the light is on - the light is turned off.

There is also a web application that sets the default color and colors during specific time periods. The web interface - in addition to showing times of button pushes - permits turning the light on with & without the timer, and turning the light off.

Setup

Getting The App Running

For the most part, it is a straight-forward Node.js application. After downloading this repo and extracting it to a directory of your choice, run:

• npm install
• npm start

You can now access http://localhost:3000/ and view the complete interface. (On my home network, I put this on a Rapsberry Pi and set the in-house DNS to know it as "nightlight". So now babysitters and family just go to http://nightlight/ to use it.)

Environment Configurables

There are some variables that much be defined in the environment before starting the application. For your convenience, you can also stored these in a .env file.

Variable	Purpose	Default
SITE_NAME	Shown in page header and logged with Hue bridge	Nightlight System
NODE_ENV	Determines if application should cache & catch uncaught errors (if set to production), or exit	blank
PORT	Port app listens on	3000
SESSION_SECRET	How cookie data is encrypted	secret

Keeping The App Running

You'll find plenty of other great tutorials on the web about running a Node.js app as a daemon, but here are a couple:

• http://howtonode.org/deploying-node-upstart-monit
• https://serversforhackers.com/video/process-monitoring-with-supervisord

Screenshots

Desktop interface for monitor and control

Mobile interface for monitor and control

Acknowledgements

• Original blog about hacking the Dash button
• jscolor Color Picker - Makes selecting colors really easy
• Nunjucks - Really great templating language for JavaScript
• flatpickr - Fast way to add time handling to the interface
• node-dash-button - Fantastic module to find Node button on the network, and bind it to events. No longer used, but inspiring.
• node-hue-api - Wonderful module to find and control Philips Hue bridges and bulbs
• FastLED + ESP8266 Web Server - Saved me a ton of time programming a non-Hue LED circuit