For more than a century, the basic desk lamp has remained largely unchanged: provide a light source, direct it toward a desired area, and switch it on. Watti approaches the familiar object as a robotics project, giving the lamp its own movement, sensing capabilities, and software-based control.
The structure resembles a compact robotic arm with a light source at its end. Five independently motorized axes control the base, shoulder, elbow, neck, and head. Each axis uses a RobStride motor capable of reporting its position back to the computer, allowing the system to coordinate its movements with measured control.
Light comes from a ring of 45 individually addressable WS2812 RGB LEDs. A Raspberry Pi 5 running ROS 2 acts as the central computer, coordinating the lamp's movement and lighting. The system's most distinctive component, however, is its camera. An Orbbec Astra Mini S captures both color and depth information at 640 × 480 resolution and 30 frames per second, giving Watti a three-dimensional view of the area in front of it.
For now, the camera feeds can be viewed through the companion software, but they are not yet used for significant autonomous actions. That is expected to change as development progresses. Planned capabilities include hand tracking, automatic work-area illumination and 3D scanning. These features could eventually allow Watti to determine where activity is taking place and reposition its light accordingly.
The lamp is already highly programmable through Watti Studio, a browser-based visual editor. Users can create scenes by synchronizing robotic movement and LED configurations on a shared timeline. A virtual model of the five-axis lamp allows poses and lighting settings to be previewed and refined before the finished scene is transferred to the Raspberry Pi, where it can run locally without a permanent browser connection.
The current prototype relies on an external 24V, 10A power supply and uses approximately $700 worth of components, placing it firmly in research and enthusiast territory. Plans to publish hardware files, a bill of materials, electrical diagrams, the communication protocol and example scenes could eventually make the project easier for others to reproduce and develop.
Watti's larger idea is to treat lighting as a spatial and contextual system. Instead of simply illuminating wherever a user points it, the lamp is being developed to understand where work is happening and potentially adjust its position and lighting accordingly. That makes it less a conventional lamp with robotic joints and more an early experiment in adaptive workspace lighting.
