Craftalight the OSHW handbag LED light

Start hacking your handbag with Craftalight the small USB powered sew-able LED light. Open Source Hardware!

19,88 

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Category:Tags:, SKU: HHTF00051

Description

Craftalight is a small hackable USB-powered LED light for your handbag. With its integrated Hall-Effect switch it can sense a magnet sewn into the lid of a handbag/backpack thus lighting up when needed!

Craftalight header

Features

  • Hackable: open source hardware and firmware
  • Small and light: 70x20x6.5mm and ~10g
  • Available with white and black PCB solder mask
  • Adjustable brightness
  • Warm white LEDs (3200K) under a frosted acrylic diffusor window
  • Hall-Effect switch to detect when the purse is opened
  • High quality and low stress design components
  • EPDM rubber seal to prevent dust accumulating between the PCB and the acrylic diffusor
  • Sew-able using the holes in the PCB
  • Includes a strong, sew-able magnet
  • for you to tinker: most unused micro-controller pins broken out to soldering pads
  • power-bank “blip” function for improved compatibility!

OSHW

Firmare repository on Github

Hardware repository on Github

Craftalight OSHWA Certification DE000016

What’s included?

  • 1 Craftalight with a Black PCB
  • 1 sewable neodymium magnet
  • A set of self-adhesive hook-and-loop dots

How does it work?

The Craftalight is based on a STM8 microcontroller and a Hall-Effect sensor. The Hall-Effect sensor senses the presence of magnetic fields which enables it to detect the presence of a magnet. This allows you to make the Craftalight switch on or off using a magnet on the lid of the purse or bag. To allow different setups you can configure whether the Craftalight should switch on in presence or absence of the magnet. To power the Craftalight, you can either use a USB power bank or provide 3.3 to 5.5V on two pads on the PCB directly. 

Craftalight disassembled
Craftalight disassembled

Let’s talk about technology

Ok, cool, what do you want to know?

  • The microcontroller is an STM8S003 controller (it has 8kB of flash and 1024 bytes of RAM)
  • The LEDs are rated for 150mA at 3V. On the Craftalight we drive them with 110mA max. This ensures they don’t heat up much which is beneficial to their life-time while they’re still super bright
  • The LEDs are switched by a single N-Channel MOSFET which is driven by the micro-controller.
  • Dimming? Yes, using PWM (at about 40kHz)
  • What’s the current consumption? Full on we’re at about 230mA and in the off state the Craftalight draws just around 100uA. With the power-blip feature enabled that figure rises to ~1mA average
  • What programming language / IDE? Visual Studio Code with the Platform.io plugin. The compiler being SDCC (Small Device C Compiler) the programming language is SDCC-flavored C. We didn’t use any fancy library, RTOS etc because the application is rather simple
  • Do I need some specialized gear to program the micro-controller? Yes, you’ll need a SWIM-compatible programming adapter (for examples on of our ST-Link v2 adapters). If you don’t own one yet, have a look at the reward description above
  • Won’t the magnet demagnetize / damage my credit card magnet strip? It should not, unless you hold the card directly on the magnet for a long period of time. This is because the credit cards (and most other magnet strip cards that are not meant to be re-written often) use high coercivity strips which require powerful magnetic fields to change. As long as your cards stay approx. 2cm / 1 inch away from the magnet they should be a safe

Configuration and setup

  • To set the Brightness, click the button while Craftalight is on until the desired brightness is reached.
  • To enter the setup mode hold the button for 1+ seconds until the Craftalight start to fade on/off repeatedly
    • Click the button to invert the hall-effect switch sensor (ON or OFF in the presence of a strong magnetic field). Craftalight Blinks twice to confirm.
    • Double-click the button to toggle the USB-power blip feature. Blinks 5 times slowly to confirm feature is ON or 10 times quickly to confirm it is OFF.

To reset the configuration, hold the button while resetting Craftalight (e.g. connecting power to it via USB when it was previously disconnected). Craftalight blinks 5 times to confirm the configuration has been reset.

The default configuration is:

  • Maximum brightness
  • Power-blip feature: enabled
  • Hall-switch Inversion: enabled (lights up when no magnet is present)

Power-Bank compatibility

Many of the better power banks out there implement no-load power-off to save battery. They basically turn off whenever there was “no” load for some interval. The current draw from the Craftalight is way below that threshold resulting in the power banks cutting power. In order to trick them into staying on, we added a “power-blip” feature which makes the Craftalight draw about 100mA for a few milliseconds every ~15s. While wasteful, we found that this is a value that seems to work with many of the power banks out there.

Additional information

Weight 0,025 kg
Dimensions 7 × 2 × 0,7 cm
Brand

HHTronik

Manufacturer

HHTronik / Staudt Technologies GmbH

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