Beat the Basement Blues With a Smart LED “Window”

For those of you who have ever lived in your parents’ basement, you know all too well how dark it can get — especially when there’s only those two slim windows that barely let any light in. That’s why Maker “dannyk6” decided to brighten his cellar up a bit to make it feel a little less claustrophic.

To accomplish this, he created a fake window with LED strips that give off some natural-looking light. Powered by a Raspberry Pi, the window is controllable via web interface.

This enables dannyk6 to either manually or automatically set the brightness of the LEDs depending on sunset/sunrise times as well as weather pulled from the Yahoo API. Meaning, if it’s sunny, the window is bright; if it’s cloudy, the window is dimmer. It will also fade on at sunrise, and fade off at sunset. You would never know it’s not real!

With winter quickly approaching, this could be a fun project to take on in the coming months. You can check out the entire build here.