About: The opinions in my posts are personal and not necessarily shared by the company I work for. Sometimes I don't agree with myself either. PhD in Computer Science and Engineering.

What?

Imagine sending your heart beat to a (remote) flashing display. This is both a tool that can be used to monitor someone's HR (heart rate) with a visual feedback, even remotely, but also a nice Valentine's surprise: honey, I give you my heart! :)

The lamp flashes with a frequency equal to the heart rate sensed by the HR monitor.

The round glass body of the lamp I'm using as enclosure serves the purpose of making it nice, shiny, and so that light is uniformly diffused for a closer product-like result.

The HR is taken from any Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) sensor: I used a RF(radiofrequency)/BLE combo chest band that can connect to my phone, but modern bluetooth wrist bands or smartwatches with an optic HR monitor should work as well, as long as they can be paired with non-proprietary applications (i.e. Runtastic, Strava, Google Fit, Apple's Health, etc).

How?

I used the following components, scroll down for the building steps:

1) 1m ws2813 rgb LED strip:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/NEW-DC5V-1m-4m-5m-...

get the non waterproof version, with 60 leds/m. Note you can do this with ws2812 and ws2812b LEDs as well, the light will be exactly the same and these are cheaper. The ws2813 are just more reliable, as they have a redundant data connection, so if you break one LED, the rest of the strip will keep working.

2) an Ikea Fado lamp:

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/lighting/table-...

This was 15€, roughly 18$.

3) as wifi-enabled micro-controller, I have used a Wemos D1 mini:



https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/D1-mini-M...



4$, or roughly 3.5€

4) one 5v, 2a power supply, soon to be replaced with a 3a one

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1PCS-5V-3000mA-3A-...

This was 3.5$. Note that you'll have to reduce the maximum brightness unless you use a power supply with at least 4A

5) some spare dupont cables:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-Dupo...

6) a spare DC barrel jack adapter:

http://www.ebay.ie/itm/For-Cctv-1Pair-Male-Female-...

7) any BLE enabled HR monitor. I have used a Medisana Bluetooth chest band, found in Lidl for 15€. It looks like this is similar, though more expensive:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Bluetooth-V4-0-Wir...

If you have a smartwatch with a HR monitor, chances are that will work already!