Add Voice Control to Your Old Lamp With an ESP8266 and Alexa
Electric lighting has been around for many years, producing some interesting designs. Voice control of appliances, however, is much younger. If you’d like to add Tony Stark-like voice commands to an older and unusual lamp, this project by Becky Stern is a great place to start.

Her setup stuffs an ESP8266 module in the form of an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH, along with a Power Relay FeatherWing to control AC current, into the wooden base of a vintage lamp. She opened up the base using a Forstner drill bit and chisel, and after arranging the components inside and some programming work, so can now ask Alexa to turn he light on!

Stern’s Arduino code emulates a Belkin WeMo device using fauxmoESP library, which makes configuration just as simple as commercial gadget in the Alexa app.
It feels natural to say “Alexa, turn the light on,” so I felt extra clever in naming my smart light. To have multiple devices on the same network, you could tell them apart by naming them “the hallway light” or “the nightlight,” for example.
Though she implemented this nicely with a lamp, this kind of build could importantly be done with any sort of device that need a voice upgrade.


