Smart lighting 'mesh'

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  • Hi. I am trying to figure out how to proceed with a small project I need to complete. What I want to do is having a simple web-app that will control 2 Bluetooth bulbs, each Puck essentially will control one bulb. The first puck will connect to a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the second puck will communicate through the first puck (something like Bluetooth Mesh but as simple as possible). I need some advice about what do I need to use to achieve this.

    So from I understand, I need a server on the Pi, that will be linked with a cloud service (is Google Cloud IoT Core a good choice?, or Firebase maybe?) and the web-app will be connected with the cloud service. Do I understand this right? What would you suggest as the best approach, in terms of tools that I can find tutorials and documentation about, since I am new and will need to learn mostly all of them.

    Btw, Gordon have you seen these starters kits at Google cloud IoT Core page? Why not offering a Espruino kit there?

  • I can't provide any advice on the cloud platform I'm afraid - there are literally hundreds out there. Although from the sound of it, you could avoid the cloud completely and could serve everything off the Pi if you wanted, using DynDNS to access it remotely?

    Personally, I'd suggest using EspruinoHub to get started: http://www.espruino.com/Puck.js+Node-RED­

    You could write the code on your Pucks to control the lights, then simply use the examples on that page to send commands in response to some stimuli - either a button on the Node-Red UI, or in response to MQTT/similar from some cloud service.

    I hadn't seen that IoT core page, but while it'd be nice to get Espruino listed, big parts of it still seem beta and likely to change (at least according to their docs). Maybe when it's settled down it might be an idea, but for the moment I don't have time to spend putting a kit together when chances are it'll require more work to support their tweaked API in a few months time :(

  • Thanks @Gordon, I am experimenting with Node-Red for a start, and we'll see where that gets me :)

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Smart lighting 'mesh'

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