Getting Started
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A Neopixel Floor Lamp with a Twist
This is probably the coolest thing I have built with Adafruit electronics! When I viewed the learn guide describing the Floor Lamp with NeoPixels and WLED Custom Animations by Erin St Blaine I knew that I just had to build this work of art. I tend to like building things with wood, so my adaption of Erin's design for the most part replaces some elements with wood structures. I was pleasantly surprised with the results!
Materials
For the most part I followed Erin's design. My parts list is as follows:
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Home CAN Bus Network Using Telephone Wiring
Have you ever wondered what you can do with your unused twisted-pair telephone wire running throughout your house? Well, how about using it as the transport medium for a CAN bus network of environmental sensors? This project, which I dubbed PhoneCAN, is a relatively easy project which uses Adafruit hardware and CiruitPython. My setup uses four CAN nodes:
- A "home" node with an OLED Featherwing display on an RP2040 CAN feather with MCP2515 CAN controller that can show current values for all four nodes using the buttons on the display
- A "send" node with ESP32-S3 Feather and CAN bus Featherwing MCP2515. This node gathers measurements from all nodes at a user-specified interval (I use 15 minutes), averages them over the interval, and pushes them to Adafruit IO.
- Two "remote" nodes which use RP2040 CAN Feathers with MCP2515 CAN controllers.
- I used two types of sensors (just because these were the ones I had on-hand) as I was interested in tracking temperature and relative humidity around my house. Any of Adafruit's environmental sensors should work:
- Gather all those old phone patch cables that you have lying around in drawers around your house (be careful though, some cables have "swapped" wiring). For most of my nodes I used RJ11 breakout boards to connect the three-wire CAN controller to my home phone jacks.
I have all of my nodes reading and posting measurements every second to the CAN bus. Documentation and sample code provided on my PhoneCAN github repository. I believe that this is a relatively easy project and was really a lot of fun to put together. Best part?.. Using that old (abandoned by the steady march of technological progress) twisted pair phone cable sitting in the walls of my house.
