I've been thinking a lot about human interaction with LED lighting. Color LED lighting is based on the principal of mixing red, green, and blue (RGB) to generate other colors. I've played with some commercially available lighting controllers (IKEA, MINI, etc) and these systems allow you to pick from a selection of colors. The caveat to these systems is that the color produced is always fully saturated.

Fully saturated color is almost never what I want when I think about living with LED lighting in my home. I want a hint of yellow, or a cool blue, but never fully saturated. Anyone that uses Adobe's suite of design software knows there are several methods, or color spaces, available to select color. These include RGB, HSB, and CMYK. The most natural of these is HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) developed by Alvy Ray Smith in the mid-70's at Xerox PARC. The beauty of HSB is it allows you to pick a hue, then adjust the saturation from pure white, to fully saturated color.

Inspired by the work of Dieter Rams for Braun, and vintage audio receivers, I set out to build a small knob-based controller for my first experiment in lighting control.

Build Details: I used a commercially available powder coated enclosure that I laser engraved to burn away the powder coating and reveal the markings. Three potentiometers control hue, saturation, and brightness while Arduino does the software conversion from the HSB color space to RGB.

I'm currently using this controller to light my liquor cabinet. In the event that Mr. Rams stops by for a Scotch, I should be all set.