Sector 07's "Project LUMEN" Is a Voice-Activated Coffee-Making Sci-Fi Sunrise Simulator

UPDATE (10/04/2022): Anyone interested in building their own version of Project LUMEN, a multi-function sci-fi-themed sunrise-simulating headboard, which doubles as a voice assistant with coffee-making capabilities, now has somewhere to start thanks to semi-pseudonymous creator Austin.

A step-by-step guide to production of the first LUMEN system has been published to Instructables, complete with a full parts list, STL files for 3D printing, and source code, but comes with a warning: "This project is a version one prototype," Austin says, "so although it works and is stable there may still be minor bugs or things that could be improved. The Arduino program is written in a way that I understand but it may not be everyone's cup of tea."

"I am including all necessary documentation. That being said if anyone has suggestions or improvement ideas I am open to hearing them. Also, a lot of the images in this guide are screenshots from the YouTube video because I didn’t decide I was going to share this project until afterward so I didn’t take step by step photos."

Original article continues below.

Semi-pseudonymous maker Austin of TechForge, now known as Sector 07, has built a bed frame offering an artificial sunrise through LED lighting, voice assistant functionality, and even automatic coffee making capabilities — but is sharing details of the project through the medium of science fiction shorts.

"From what I can tell it was designed for both spacers and earth dwellers," Austin's hacker character explains of the device, supposedly "hacked" from the servers of the "Terran Global" corporation. "Serves as a kind of external stimuli inducer. Like an artificial sun? Supposed to keep spacers from going mad out there in the deep dark. Also has a basic AI built in to control it. Hard to describe, maybe one of you will have a better understanding of it."

In reality, Austin's creation is a curved LED lighting system designed to be placed over the head end of the user's bed and featuring RGB control to simulate a sunrise when it's time to wake up. A bent wooden frame with hexagonal grid pattern and 3D-printed internal brackets holds the hardware and a diffusion sheet, and inside are two Arduino Mega boards.

"One is just solely for the LED light animations," Austin explains, "and the second one runs the main program and basically everything else. It has an RTC, or real-time clock, module, I believe it's the DS3231. To be able to play audio I've got the Adafruit MP3 Player that can interpret files from an SD card for playing audio.

"For speech recognition I'm using a pretty neat little module called the SpeakUp Click Board that can interpret my voice into signals that can be read by the program. I've also got an LCD screen and a keypad just to make it easier to enter the time settings for what time to wake up and just manipulate the menus of this thing for things beyond voice command."

Just in case that wasn't enough, the project has a bonus feature: an automatic coffee maker, to start every spacer's day off right. "I basically just hacked and rewired it a little bit so that it would be able to interface with this [project]," Austin explains.

"Basically [it's] just a couple of relays that would be able to bypass the buttons that normally start the machine. I also added a coffee cup present sensor so that way the AI would know whether there was one there or not and therefore know whether it should start the machine or not."

Full details are available in the project's lengthy and creative video overview, while schematics and source code have been promised but at the time of writing had not yet been provided.