Posts with «holiday» label

Arduino Lighting Controller With Remote Twist

The time for putting up festive lights all around your house is nigh, and this is a very popular time for those of us who use the holiday season as an excuse to buy a few WiFi chips and Arduinos to automate all of our decorations. The latest in this great tradition is [Real Time Logic]’s cloud-based Christmas light setup.

In order to give public access to the Christmas light setup, a ESP8266 WiFi Four Relay board was configured with NodeMCU. This allows for four channels for lights, which are controlled through the Light Controller Server software. Once this is setup through a domain, all anyone has to do to change the lighting display is open up a web browser and head to the website. The creators had homeowners, restaurants, and church displays in mind, but it’s not too big of a leap to see how this could get some non-holiday use as well.

The holidays are a great time to get into the hacking spirit. From laser-projected lighting displays to drunk, animatronic Santas, there’s almost no end to the holiday fun, and you’ve still got a week! (Or 53!)


Filed under: Holiday Hacks
Hack a Day 16 Dec 03:00
arduino  christmas  display  esp8266  holiday  holiday hacks  lights  relay  remote  

Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit

The holidays are all about eggnog, ugly sweaters and disconnecting from the internet just long enough to reassure the family you still care. For those of us with web separation anxiety, the folks at MAKE have hooked us up with an easy way to stay hip to incoming emails -- by connecting the holiday fir to the Internets. It works as such: using an Arduino and PHP script, the tree will check for incoming emails and light up if the number has increased. The set-up can be tweaked based on your most valued type of alert like YouTube comments, texts or changes in the weather. To the family, it will look like unparalleled holiday cheer rather than your cue to ditch the sing-a-long and get back to Gmail. Check out the video after the break.


[Thanks, Matt]

Continue reading Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit

Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Engadget 19 Dec 06:09
arduino  christmas  hack  hacking  holiday  internet  make  php  script  scripting  video