This DIY Strip Light Stair Lighting Design and Install over at Speedy Signals looks nice. The project uses a ATmega328P which is very common in the Arduino scene. The microcontroller interfaces with some shift registers to power the lights. Some 2N7000 mosfets are used to drive the actual LED lights. By using the Arduino ShiftPWM library he is able to have individual control of all the steps. Beam sensors were
Instructables member ganglion from England installed some LED stair lighting on his stairs. He built a custom DIY circuit that allows the lights to be dimmed. To make things a bit simpler he decided to only light every second step and simply run the wires on the edge of the stairs from top to bottom. We have seen other stair lighting systems like this one that have the wires run in
An automatic stair lighting system is one which lights each step LED when a user starts to climb or descend.  Erica Kane has developed a similar Open Source DIY Automated LED Stair Lighting system using an Arduino Pro Mini, a M5451 LED Display Driver to power the LEDs and a PING ultrasound distance sensors to detect when someone enters the stairwell. The Eagle schematic file is here and the Arduino Processing
Those who are having foot lights in their stairway, then acme663ryo has an interesting stuff for you. According to acme663ryo, your foot lights are having epoxy pools of glass in the knot holes. These can be triggered by any light motion sensor, which in turn drives a solid state relay. The relay during its active cycle switches your DC power supply ON and through which you can connect your LED lights. In
Instructables member ElJefeUno brought an awesome electronics project of building an Infra-red (IR) light trip sensor to light up your stairway. The sensor uses a directional IR LED beamed at a sensor that shoots past where you’ll walk. When you interrupt the light from the LED, the LEDs turn on for a period of time that you can adjust. Advantages of using IR LEDs includes: safe operation, low power consumption,
Instructables member Quanchante shared an interesting project of building a relatively cheap and pretty darn easy-to-assemble step lights made out of LEDs. If you are interested then get ready with the following Materials:  Glue gun and glue sticks Soldering gun and solder Felt or Thick fabric that matched the carpet on my existing steps 5mm UltraBright LEDs, color: Pure White with clear lens (3 per step light) 9v Battery (1 per step light)
Good, fast and cheap. This is a real headslap idea once you see it. Just take some Lego, milk and a web cam to make a 3D scanner. Then use the software from Moviesandbox to input the image to your computer. I guess you might have to switch to chocolate milk for a light colored object. Of course the idea was borrowed from Michelangelo. Stanford University has a program
