Smart Stairs Now Exist...But Should They?

hey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff over the past six years you've seen me replace all of the carpet in my entire house with hardwood floor except for this staircase so today I'm going to show you how to take up some old carpet and replace it with some really nice hardwood steps and then we're going to take it one step further and add awesome lights to it let's give it a shot [Music] okay the first thing we got to do here is take up the old carpet if you've never taken up carpet it's easy to do but it is a little bit tedious because there's a few steps you have to pull the carpet up then you have to take up the tack strips and you probably will have a whole bunch of Staples holding foam down that's broken up over the years so it just takes a little while but if you take up carpet and you roll it into about two foot long rolls most trash companies will take it if you put it out by your trash can [Music] how'd you cut it up here oh just the cuts roll down the stairs yeah well done the Lego [Music] once you have these things up you can just break them down into small pieces and put them in a trash can just be careful because they are very very sharp now I have like a million Staples to take up and then I gotta vacuum this surface clean and before I do the rest of these I'm actually going to replace this entire Landing with the same hardwood floor so we're not really going to show you that after I get that finished we'll go on get these cleaned off and then start working on the new stairs it took me a long time and I didn't show you all of it but I finally got all of the carpet off these stairs all of the Staples and the tack strips pulled out so this is how most construction grade stairs are and then they just put something on top of them carpet or stair treads and in this case we're going to swap the carpet for a stair tread if you want to save money but spend a little more time you could Mill your own Lumber make your own stair treads cut your own pieces for the Riser and paint them and put them on or you could do like I did spend a little bit more money and actually buy those things pretty much ready to go I ended up buying two products that are just made to make this a lot easier I got the risers that are just solid poplar they're pre-painted so you can just cut them fit them and glue them right to this surface and then that part's pretty much good to go I also bought stair treads these are solid oak they have a pretty nice simple profile on them they're a little bit longer than most stairs so you can cut them down to the right length you can stain them put clear coat on them and then just glue them to the existing stairs and you're pretty much done so if that's your goal just to replace carpet with a hardwood stair that's really all you need to do you can just decide how much time and money you want to put into it but we're going to take this one step further so my plan for the steps is to add some interactive lighting my friend Andy bird made a video on his YouTube channel about adding LEDs underneath each step and it looks really really great but I want to take that one step further and make them interactive with motion sensors So the plan is to add a strip underneath each overhang of each step and then put some motion sensors underneath the handrail then use an Arduino to be able to kind of figure out where a person is moving up and down the stairs and then only light up a few stairs in front of and a few stairs behind the person because I didn't know any better I assumed that this skirt piece was cut to fit around the stairs but apparently in new construction if they're going to be putting carpet on the stairs they just put this down first and then put the stair treads in front of it so this piece of wood actually goes all the way down in there I can't get it out very easily so if I want to take this out I have to cut it there's a lot of different methods to be able to make stairs go around it but if you're in this situation and you need to make your stair go all the way up to this outside edge you're going to have to scribe the side of the stair and then cut that angle it's not going to be 90 degrees to the Riser so I'm going to have to do that on this side but on this side we actually have a different problem my plan was to take this skirt out hollow out the back of it and then have a way to run all of the wiring for the lights and for everything down behind this piece so we could take this up and get to that wiring if we need to but because this skirt is all the way down in behind the stairs we're going to have to cut it out following the line of the stairs and then end up cutting it to meet the new stair treads that we put down it's going to be a lot of extra work but I think it's going to be really cool before we get to the other side the kind of custom piece I wanted to show you how you might figure this thing out to make up for the Gap here this is a digital angle finder and so you can turn it on zero it so that you have no angle then you spread these things out put one side against the back the other side against the outside and then you can see that it's actually 91 degrees so when you go to cut this stair with an the miter saw just set the saw to 91 degrees instead of 90 degrees and it'll meet this wall all right let's go to the other side the goal is to eventually have a little slot running all the way down every stair so that I can run all the wires in there and then I'm going to cover it up with this piece of trim but to do that I have to actually cut out this thing remove it and then create that slot I've got a piece of the stair tread here just cut off an end I use that and I'm going to have to trace that profile on every one of these steps that's going to be my end goal but I need to cut away this area right here so that I can hide the wires foreign I got this thing all cut out didn't take quite as long as I thought but I do have a rough Edge that I'm gonna have to clean up or figure out I also kind of started rethinking how all these pieces are going to overlap let me show you what the problem is so originally I was thinking that the Riser would go on the stair would hook around it and there'd be a little Gap in between them for the LEDs then this skirt would be cut to fit but if that's the case and that means that I have to cut along this entire line and if I get that wrong in one place it's going to be wrong all the way up so instead what I think I'm going to do is actually put the Riser on first cut along this line so that the skirt matches the Riser and once I get that all fit then I'll come back and put the stair actually on top of everything I'll just have to make sure that both sides of the stair tread are cut to fit both sides of the skirt foreign [Applause] I've got that angle so now this is going to meet up with the wall on the skirt but we're going to run LEDs along this top Edge and then we need to be able to kind of put that wire somewhere so on each one of these we're going to have to make a little Notch up here so the wires can go back down into the cavity that will eventually be covered up by the big skirt oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign is all cut and ready to be put back down but before I put it back down I have to put the wires down and then make some holes in the wall so we can connect all this stuff because I've gathered all the different pieces that I think I need I could have made all these wires and everything from scratch but it was actually a lot easier to just buy wires with connectors on the ends that will already plug right into the LED strips the only thing I'm really going to have to solder here is cutting the LED strips down into the right length and adding some wires to the end for this project I bought three PIR sensors an ESP module to act as the brain a bunch of LED strips and a power supply now this power supply is really important in this case I'm using rgbw LEDs so each one of the little LEDs that you see actually has four LEDs on the inside of it so we can control the color and the color temperature but because of that if we use all those LEDs at one time it actually uses a lot of power so you have to make sure that the power supply that you get can keep up I've got a 40 amp power supply this thing is more than enough hopefully and I have to fit figure out how to put this thing in a place where I can get to it so my next steps here are to run the wires cover those wires up with the skirt and then connect all the electronics down in a box that I have yet to embed in the wall let's go do that [Music] we've got all these wires pulled down here and so what I'm going to do is actually cut a hole in this wall and push all the wiring into there drop it down and then deal with it on the other side of the wall in a minute but I want to make sure that everything is accessible this is all low voltage stuff I don't want to embed any of it in the wall the only thing that's going to be inaccessible going forward are these wires but I can definitely still get to both ends of them [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] now we're ready to start doing the normal stair building cutting these Treads to fit each one of these locations but we have to do them one at a time now the reason you want to do these one at a time is because you don't necessarily know if the two sides of the stairwell are parallel and if they are not parallel then the difference between them the distance from side to side is going to get worse or longer from top to bottom or bottom to top so you need to work on each one at a time and on each stair you want to make sure that you're measuring the front and the back of the stair and that gives you an idea of whether they're like this or like this but then you also probably want to check the angle from the side to the front because they could be like this so take your time measure and map out each one of these before you make your Cuts because these stair treads are not cheap I've got my measurements for the first step and I'm going to use the miter saw to cut the two angles on the sides but this step has a big gap underneath it if I want to cut it this Direction so I just put together a couple pieces of material to act as a lift that's going to support the back side of it so that I can put it into the saw see it the exact same way it would be on the stairs and then I can cut the two sides to length [Music] I got all the steps cut down to size and then had to do little bits of trimming and sanding to get them to fit nicely but now they're good they're spread out around the shop and ready for finish for the finish I'm going to be using a polyurethane that's made for floors same stuff you would use if you were refinishing hardwood floors it only takes a couple of coats but I'll probably do three or four and you can space those out about four hours with very little sanding in between it's a pretty simple process it just smells bad and takes a while [Music] thank you [Music] so the stairs are pretty much done if you wanted to stop right here you would have some nice looking hardwood stairs and just some extra paint on the trim and you'd be all good to go but I'm me so I'm not going to stop I want to add the lights and the motion sensors to these so the next step is to make removable light bars that we can stick in each one of these steps so the idea with the LEDs is that I want to make a removable block that I can slide up underneath each one of the steps I can plug it in if I ever need to change it I can take it out and swap it with a new one so I've got these led strips that I cut down to length I soldered on a little connector so I can just plug them in but I need to make these things rigid so that I can take them in and out so I'm going to stick this to a piece of plywood and then I'm going to make a diffuser that goes on the front of it to do that I'm going to use some plexiglass each one of these is going to be stuck to a half inch piece of plywood it'll be fine for sliding it up in the stair and then for the diffuser I'm going to use this piece of Plexiglas it's old and gross and doesn't matter because you won't see it but before I cut this into strips I'm going to take a sander and diffuse the entire surface so it'll help spread the light [Music] it would have made sense to cut this piece first to length and then ripped it and I just forgot [Music] it's not that thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] I got all these things made actually didn't take very long and I tested them out they work really well but to get them to stay in there we actually have to kind of wedge them in place and for that we're going to use these little shims that are actually made for tiles so normally you slide these underneath tiles to lift them up so you can make sure they're all level we're going to use these on the side to slide them up underneath the stairs to make sure that these things are wedged in place and then we'll cut them off to the right length so you don't see them if you need to get them out you can stick a knife up in there pop it out this thing will come right out so let's go install these things foreign [Music] I've got these little PIR sensors and a 3D printed amount for them to go into that exposes the sensor part and it's got screw holes so I can mount these to the bottom of the handrail and I can adjust the placement so if I need them to aim One Direction to detect motion I can do that the wires are going to run all the way down this thing and go into the wall just like the wires did for the lights and then we'll join all of those up in a box down there with the Arduino so I've got all the wires coming out of this wall and these are coming from the lights and the sensors I cut a hole here the size of a project box so that I can house everything inside this plastic box this will be mounted in there and be flush with the wall but I don't really want to see just this black surface so I cut a piece of Walnut that'll go right on top of it just to dress it up a little bit but the whole idea is to run everything in this box add a power supply and an Arduino so that we can get everything contained in one place just in case there are any problems with the wiring [Music] so this entire project is going to run on an Arduino Uno which is the one that we use in our Arduino course Arduino for makers if you want to check it out but I'll briefly want to talk about how we're actually going to do this because it took me a little while to figure out and rather than going through the code let's go to the Whiteboard so here's what the plan is we'll see if it actually works out we have 10 steps and each one of them has a row of lights and we're going to address each light in each step at the same time so basically we have 10 lights to deal with then we have three PIR sensors up here and I've got them spread out evenly across the handrail and so I applied one of these PIR sensors to basically four steps and then they overlap by one so as we trigger One sensor we can handle four lights as we trigger two sensors we can handle eight lights and so on we're just gonna have to do a little bit of basic math to be able to move up and down the stairs earlier on I was telling you about our new online course Arduino for makers and the whole reason we made the course is to simplify the process to teach you how to write code make Electronics put them together to make your projects more awesome and you don't have to have any experience with those things we walk you through it from the very beginning and we want to make it even easier for you by making it cheaper so right now we've got a 10 off discount for the course you can hit the link down in the description and use the code May for makers and you get 10 enough once you learn it and you make some stuff I would love to see what you make so be sure to share it with us let's get back to the build this is the power supply I'm going to use it's a 40 amp Supply so it should be more than enough for all the LEDs I've got all the power and ground wires going into one little board that goes into the power supply and this is also going to power the Arduino so the only thing left to do is to take all of these data wires for each one of the LEDs and the sensors plug them right in here and then we can test it out foreign [Music] so I thought the programming was all done but it turns out that it actually was a lot more difficult than I expected I had to take out one of the motion sensors and rewrite the code around that and then I had to rewrite it two or three more times for different libraries anyway after a lot of work I got it working and it works really well now but before we close this thing up with this cover that I made I need to drill a couple holes here so that we can have the power cord come out of this and have a button so we can switch modes on the lights [Music] foreign [Music] I did have to change how I was doing the motion sensors a little bit but it worked out great and the kids are really enjoying it and I think it's a really nice addition while I was programming I went ahead and added a few different modes though so other than the sensing we actually have a bright mode we've got a night light mode and a Christmas mode now the cool thing about this is it's just one animation we can swap out those colors with anything we want for any holiday or any other animation that we want to show on the stairs very easily now because the programming on this was actually a little bit more complicated than I expected I actually want to make a deep dive about the code and about all the things I had to deal with and we're going to add it onto the end of our Arduino for makers course if you want to get that and learn how to do this type of stuff for yourself go to arduinoformakers.com if you've got a set of stairs in your house that you want to improve hopefully now you've got some ideas of how you can make them look nicer or make them super cool and if you've got ideas for other animations that I could add to this staircase leave them down in the comments because I would love some more ideas thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers bright mode off mode night light Christmas and then I'm going to take this and screw it right to the bottom of this wooden handrail press press press I'm going to be using a polyurethane polyurethane

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 624,725

Keywords: 3D printing, arduino, arduino project, beginners guide, building a smart home, diy, do it yourself, electronics, google home, hardwood floor installation, hardwood stairs installation, home upgrades, i like to make stuff, iliketomakestuff, maker, motion sensor, smart home, smart home for beginners, smart home ideas, smart lights, stair renovations, stair updates, stairs makeover, updating stairs, updgrading stairs, wood stairs, woodworking

Id: mb-QXVszyOk

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023