ALANG Wireless Bedroom WakeUpLight

Materials: Ikea Alang, Ikea Sparsam (Dimable), Philips HUE, Philips LivingWhites

Description: I wanted to have a way to turn on my bedroom lighting, Ikea ALANG at the ceiling and two Philips LivingColors behind the bed, when it was time to get up in the morning.

Having a Wireless Zigbee network at home to control my lighting I was looking for a way to make my Ikea ALANG bedroom fixture Zigbee enabled. I had some spare Philips Zigbee plugin units laying around and looked for a way to join the two.


Step 1:
Remove the housing from the Philips plugin unit (remember which cable goes where)

Step 2:
Get your Ikea ALANG from the ceiling.

Step 3:
Drill a hole in the plastic base of the ALANG to fix the bare board of the plugin unit and screw the board in place.

Step 4:
Connect all cables correctly and make sure you have dimmable lights installed, in my case dimmable Ikea SPARSAM.

Step 5:
Install everything back at the ceiling and power up. You now can control the light with a Philips living colors remote (zigbee) or you can turn on or off the lights by toggling the power.

Step 6:
Link you plugin unit board the A Philips HUE kit. You now can control your ceiling lights with your smartphone.

Step 7:
Configure you smartphone, in my case an Android phone to send a message to HUE when it is time to get up in the morning.

My phone checks every 2 minutes (from 6 am to 8 am) if an alarm is going off in the next 20 minutes, if true the LivingColors behind the bed start dimming up to a bright orange/red for 10 minutes. After this they turn white in 10 minutes and the ceiling lights starts dimming up from 0 to maximum in the same 10 minutes.

I have made a video about my bedroom sunrise.

The more technical, Zigbee, HUE and Android work is left out of this tutorial but can be provided on request.

Link to video.

~ Joos Blankers, Belgium