GNL Brain Swap

Bring back the light and functionality of your Good Night Lamp by replacing its old brain with this new, fresh version, fully functioning over WiFi.

In 2005 Good Night Lamp, founded by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, made it's debut as an iconic product in the early IoT landscape. It connected people over distance enabling us to let our loved ones know we were thinking about them or simply just arrived home through it's simple one button interaction. Over the years we were many that loved the idea and brought them into our homes. 

Sadly, as with many similar products from this time, the fun ended and it went out of production in March 2019 and with it the servers that powered it's magic closed down. This left our Big and Small lamps in darkness. 

The GNL Brain Swap kit allows us to bring back this magic. It swaps out the old dead brain with a fresh new one. By reusing the hardware we keep new manufacturing to a minimum, cost low and our beloved GNLs out from landfills. A win for nature and a win for our homes. 

The Specs

Each kit brings back 1x Big Lamp OR 1x Small Lamp. It's interchangeable for both. 

Connect together as many houses as you want in any configuration you want. 1x Big to 1x Big, || 1x Small to 1x Small || 23x Big with 11x Small

Simple WiFi based connectivity replaces the old GSM based approach.

As a bonus you will also get a virtual GNL included which allows you to control your GNL Big and Small from any browser. Test it here

Brain swap procedure

1. Open the back of the GNL house, where the power cord enters, by gently inserting a sharp object in the small gap between wood and plexi. It's hot glued in so some force is required. 

2. Pull the chimney button up from the house and then gently pry the bottom plexi board away from the house shell, also hot glued in, and pull out the full internals. 

3. Use a thinn sharp object to carefully seperate the hot glue between the house shaped LED PCBs and the old controller board.

4. Once freed from the hot glue, pull up the house shaped LED PCBs from their connectors. 

5. Unscrew the button cable and the power cable from the old controller board screw terminals.

6. Unscrew the three bolts holding the old controller board in place and remove the old board, save the bolts. 

7. Slide the new Brain into the 3D printed holder.

8. Use the existing three bolts and screw the new brain to the plexi.

9. Screw the power cable into the Power terminal (red cable to where it say 5V and black cable to where it say GND) and the button cable to the other free terminal labeled Button (doesn't matter which cable goes to which).

10. Attach the house shaped LED PCBs to the connectors on the new brain PCB. 

11. Push it all back into the house shell and align the chimney button. 

12. Power it up over USB and use your phone to connect to the temporary WiFi network that gets created called GNL_Brain.

13. Follow the steps that comes up when connected to this new WiFi. It will allow you to configure your WiFi credentials and to give it a group name which is what connects your houses together. The WiFi and group name will be stored in this new brain for next start. 

14. Do the same for another house and as long as you have selected the same group name, they will be in sync. 

What's included in each kit

1x assembled custom PCB with custom software

1x 3d printed sled to hold the PCB

Bring back the light