Turn your lights on and off by looking at this little robotic light switch

Unlike all other hands-free light switches that rely on infrared motion detection or changes in ambient light values, Michael Rigsby's "Look at Me Light Switch" instead requires someone stares at it for six seconds.< /p>

Based on an embedded machine learning model and microcontroller, this device uses Useful Sensors' Person Sensor, which relies on a camera to collect images, process them, and output the results via I2C. This information may include the total number of faces as well as individual bounding boxes for each detected face. From there, the information sent by the person sensor is read by an Arduino Uno and used to determine if someone is looking at the switch.

When the face is initially found, a small red LED begins to flash at the top to indicate that the user has been seen. Then, after they've watched for more than three seconds, a servo-operated googly eye spins around to show the action was successful and a relay is toggled to turn the light on or off via a remote control.

As Rigsby notes, "It's not a 'clap on, clap off' switch of years past; it's a 'watch, watch off' switch for the present age. The Clapper was popular in 1990s, so who knows, maybe his tinyML solution could be the next big thing in lighting control? To learn more about this fun project, you can watch Mike's video below and read his article here on Instructables.