Brilliant idea.
I’ve bought at least three of these things, one for my mom. If they were lost or destroyed I’d buy more. I guess that’s an endorsement.
What this is, is a small inexpensive box that plugs into the wall, with a panel of multi-colored LEDs. It can be set on, off, or to come on for various periods after dark. When it’s on it uses the panel of LEDs to effectively simulate the light coming from a television set… and does a good, convincing job of it. From outside of the room the indirect light coming from the room looks very much as if there were a TV on, with the typical changing and flickering patterns that one would see from pans, jump cuts, commercial breaks, etc., with no repeating pattern that I’ve been able to detect, giving every appearance that the room must be occupied.
It’s “set-and-forget”, you simply plug it in and switch to the desired setting, it comes on by itself at dusk and plays these patterns of lights on the walls for the set time and then shuts itself off, for however many days needed. I really like “set and forget”, life is full of way too many things demanding attention.
Three is not a whole lot of data points, but ours have worked perfectly, zero problems.
Obviously, you could do something much like this with an Arduino or similar microcontroller and some LEDs, and it would be an interesting project, especially the software component, seeing how realistic you could get it, and maybe exploring the option of using one or just a few RGB LEDs instead of the multi-color array- but when the problem is solved at this price why bother?
Oddly, this is one of those things that could become far less effective if it becomes much more popular. Part of the strength of the effect is that it simply would not occur to most potential thieves that it might be a simulation, it’s simply too remote a possibility. If they become common, those potential thieves might start to investigate more thoroughly.
This would be even more effective in combination with the ancient trick of leaving a radio playing, which also works during the day.
– Robert the Wombat