As winter drew in, the days got shorter and waking up in the morning became even more of a chore than usual. We'd looked at getting a SAD light in the past, to make winter morning wakeups that bit easier but knowing how they work and the massivley inflated prices they were available for, I refused to buy one on principle.

My mind turned to home automation. Specifically, turning the bedroom light into a giant SAD light.

There are a few ways one can accomplish this; remote switches, remote bulb holders, hard-wired controllers etc. etc. but the majority of them were purely function over form and even then, the function wasn't that intellignet.

Enter LightwaveRF, a stylish range of remotely controllable wall switches and assorted bits. These were perfect, they replaced the enitre light switch, still allowed manual control and looked good. The only problem was the Lightwave controller and its price. I was sure I could build something better for the money.

Enter the Nanode RF, one of the many Arduino (open source micro controller with various inputs/outputs) clones out there but this one has some key differences. Most importantly, it has a built-in RF transeiver, tuned to the correct 433Mhz required to communicate with the LightwaveRF switch. It also has an SD slot (perfect for storing the web UI files), an RTC chip (for keeping time without NTP or code) and an ethernet port.