A long time ago (2018), I had a hare-brained idea to make getting up in the morning easier: add light to the room on a timer. This led to a part-buying binge with quite a bit of back-and-forth on which 5V power supply to use and which LED strips would minimize the work I had to do, with a mix of SparkFun and AdaFruit parts sneaking off with my wallet. A local hardware store, Ace Hardware, provided a meter of angle aluminum.

This sat on my shelf for two years, right next to the ESP32 modules a family member got me for Christmas.

Well, technically I immediately used the adhesive backing on the LED strips to paste them to the angle aluminum, and that subassembly sat on my shelf forever. As is often the case with my projects, enclosure design stymied me--until I discovered Hammond Manufacturing project boxes at Vetco Electronics Store.

Around the start of the COVID-19 response in my country, I got the bug to make something and, with all the parts sitting around, this project was the clear winner.