Zwift game master Jon Mayfield recently shared a fun little side project with the Zwift Riders Facebook group.

Weekend* project complete: Connect my paincave smart lights to Zwift. They update 10 times a second – it’s really cool to ride under the tree canopy with sunshine coming through and have the lights go in and out as you go in and out of shadow in the game. Starts to make it feel more like an outdoor ride. I just couldn’t get a good video of that so it’s not in the clip.

(* actually this took two weekends, not one)

Here’s the short video he shared:

Want to do this in your house? Here’s more from Jon on the details of how this works, and how he may make it available to all Zwifters:

I’m thinking about exposing this info as well as live watts/cadence/gradient/etc via a UDP port on localhost so anybody can make integrations themselves. My current implementation does just that, and I have a helper program that takes the data and shuffles it over to the lights – that way the device specific stuff can stay out of Zwift’s codebase and make it easy for users to add things over the years.

And one more note from Jon about super-cool subtle details of how this works:

Also this integration has directional lighting, so since I have a radial light source above me (18 panels in a circle shape) I can actually light the right side of my body more if the sun is to my right in Zwift. As I do a U-turn the light panels change and the lighting is then on the other side. It’s subtle but cool.

Ride on, Jon!