My Openclaw isn’t very snappy yet, but tonight the lights are bright!

When we renovated our house I insisted that I get circadian lighting in my office. I loved the concept, but the buy-in was pretty steep if it wasn’t terrific. Well turns out that it creates a room that feels like an extension of the outdoors, because every 90 seconds it checks the outdoor light temperature and adjusts to match and it is incredible.

I was so sold that when I saw some Wiz pot lights on Amazon clearance I snapped them up. I thought they would make a great addition to my office. A few challenges though. The lights need non-corporate wifi and a hub to send commands — neither of which I had in my office..

Enter the ESP32. Marginally bigger than the stick of gum from hockey cards and has inputs, outputs, wifi and programmable. My AI partner and I hashed out the specifics* and after a bit of back and forth we now have the lights adjusting per schedule and working on a standalone wifi network generated by the ESP32.

While some are excited for AI to write a better email, I’m using it to build the projects living in my head.

• The gory details. I gave the AI my idea and it suggested the ESP32, flagging that I’d need a clock module for standalone operation. We worked through the circadian schedule together and it wrote the transition code — 90-second interpolation between setpoints. Then it walked me through troubleshooting the Arduino IDE to flash the chip. The breadboard pictured gets soldered together now that it’s confirmed working.