Design
Ok, now it was decided what to make, I still needed to think about how to make
it.
For a casing, I decided on an Ikea CFL-based energy efficient lamp. These
things cost 5 euro per two and are about as good as the price indicates, so I
didn't think twice before opening it and ripping out its innards.
For the LED, I decided on a
power
RGB-led from DealExtreme. It might not be the most powerful I could get,
but it's cheap so it'll have to do for the experiment. I needed a power supply
too. I could have taken something like a watt-less dropper, which lowers the
direct 220V-voltage by means of a capacitor. These devices don't have an electrical
separation between the mains input and the low-voltage output, which means it's
possible to get a nasty shock when touching the low-voltage leads when the
device is on. Knowing myself, I settled for a shock-less experience and decided
to find a really small power supply. The DealExtreme site still was open, and
after some looking around, I found a small
USB-PSU
which could deliver 5V at 1amp and should be small enough to build into the led
bulb:
The thing costs a whopping three dollars, and I'm glad I won't be using
the complete one amp it can deliver...
The remote control was somewhat of a no-brainer: I still had some nice 433MHz modules, and a USB-to-433MHz-hack I built earlier to control some wireless wall plug modules I bought a while ago. The protocol for these left some codes unused, so I decided to hijack these.
For the microcontroller I ended up using an ATTiny44. The shop I bought it from
gave me SMD ones, though. Space-wise this wasn't such a bad thing, so I decided
to use them. To make soldering a bit easier, I took a piece of proto-board and
sliced the lines on it in two, lengthwise. Since the pin distance on the chip
is half of the standard DIL-distance, I now had a piece of prototyping board I could
solder the chip on:
Ok, all the needed major components are there. Putting them together shouldn't be too much of a hassle, now should it?