I’ve been experimenting with LEDs lately, and it surprised me how much lighting feels like a “developer problem.”
LEDs aren’t hard by themselves — they just need the right current.
But the moment you add dimming, color mixing, smooth transitions, or any kind of automation, the real challenge becomes control logic, not hardware.
A few things stood out:
Brightness isn’t linear.
You need perceptual curves or gamma correction, or the dimming looks terrible.
Color accuracy depends on calibration.
Two “3000K” LEDs can look completely different without proper control.
Smart lighting is basically IoT.
Timing, communication, state management — it’s all familiar territory for devs.
Working with LEDs is a fun reminder that even simple hardware becomes interesting once you start programming the behavior around it.
Sometimes a light isn’t just a light — it’s a tiny distributed system waiting to be coded.
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