I Made a $104.50 Nightlight That Doesn’t Work
By: Leigh Fisher
Tags: Programming, Coding, Electronics, Technology, Arduino

My mindset going in was that if I made something very useful, I could justify spending a little bit of money on components. Regrettably, due to the incomplete and incorrect supply list on the motion-sensitive nightlight project I tried to follow, it turned into a very expensive experiment.

I realized rather quickly that while Arduino tutorials look simple to a fool like whose just afraid to electrocute herself cluelessly, they’re very complicated. The equipment list on this project was dead wrong in many, many ways. Some of the items listed as required were incompatible and there were several essential missing components that the tutorial creator neglected to include.

The LED strip recommended was completely wrong and completely incompatible.

The power supply in the parts list is much, much larger than the one in the poster’s photos.

An external power adapter is required for the power supply and is not sold with it.

Even more delightfully, power supply adapters don’t come with the wire actually required to plug the adapter into the wall. Luckily, I had some extra cords like this from old computer monitors.

Female to male wires were needed to collect the sensor to the breadboard.

A special, strange clampy metal thing was required to connect the power supply to the breadboard.

You need a large, printer USB for the Arduino Uno. Luckily, I also harvested one from my printer, but if you don’t have a desktop printer, you’ll be out of luck.

I acknowledge that following a terrible quality tutorial is my fault. I’m too green to see red flags — so this disastrously costly nightlight is as much my own fault as it was the tutorial creator’s. I didn’t think to look closely enough at how few “Respects” that the Arduino community had given to this tutorial.

I felt like I was in too deep with my Arduino Uno, power supply, and motion sensors. So I kept buying more components until I finally had what I needed to actually assemble this item.

After throwing more money Jeff Bezos’ way and torturing my mail person with three different deliveries over the course of three days, I started trying to assemble it. I realized rather quickly that following a tutorial means a lot of trying to trace wires in another person’s mediocre quality photos of their project.

Even with the right supplies, components… have settings.

At first, when things didn’t work, I troubleshot like I did back in my dark age of working in tech support. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Check, tried to power cycle everything.

Next, I thought that perhaps the PIR sensor was bad. I swapped it out for another of my five-pack (thanks, bulk savings I’ll probably never need since I’d rather not make any more $104.50 nightlights) and switched it out. The same issue persisted.

After that, I looked at the code. Amid the troubleshooting process, I realized that the motion sensor has a whole wealth of settings that aren’t controlled by code, but by a potentiometer and a sensitivity doodad on the side. After trying to change a bunch of physical controls with no luck, I cannibalized the entire device to try testing the motion sensor independently.

Several tutorials from Adafruit and a little extra schematic help later, at last—salvation! I finally got the motion sensor to work with a single LED on a breadboard.

Partial deliverance from purgatory!

Don’t put your blind faith into user-submitted tutorials.

With the confidence of that success, I decided to try the tutorial one last time. And I had the same exact results as before — it turned on, but the motion sensor, power supply, and code couldn’t all get along.

I think I’m a little spoiled. I’m used to working with things where I can follow a tutorial and it works. Working with any of these objects requires a massive amount of background knowledge.

Even though this isn’t a very cheerful note to end on, I feel like the only thing I learned from this is that I’m too much of a fool to even follow a tutorial. I thought that trying to follow a tutorial would help me understand how to use these components and the wide berth of things that can be done with them, but I’m just walking away feeling like more of an idiot than before. It’s not a productive mindset to keep learning, but a person can only spend so many hours tinkering with wires and so many dollars wasted on miscellaneous components before they feel defeated.

I suppose, at the end of the day, this was a long, wordy way to say this: don’t trust projects you find on the Arduino Project Hub to work.

You probably shouldn’t be a fool like me and buy things you don’t know how to use.

You probably shouldn’t expensive power supplies and other doodads unless you know exactly how to troubleshoot every last piece, because the tutorial you’re following might just be wrong in a myriad of ways.

This was undeniably a learning experience — a costly one, but a learning experience nevertheless. I do have a better sense of how to work with grounds on the Arduino and a loose idea of how the motion sensors work. This was an ill-conceived endeavor and my desperate attempt to try and make something that practical that functioned.

I’m walking away from this project with a $104.50 nightlight that doesn’t work, but a slightly better understanding of wiring.