Holiday Cheer Lights
Happy Holidays from Spark!
Last week many of us Sparklers met in person for the first time at our first big holiday party and hackathon! It was awesome, and we'll be posting more fun projects from the hackathon soon. In decorating for the party, Christine insisted the tree be internet connected, and so we excitedly set off to work. Here's what we built:
Internet connected cheer lights and buttons!
Overview
This was an awesome opportunity! The party decorations need only be limited by our imaginations and time constraints. We decided that we'd decorate not just the tree, but the whole office with lights, and that they should be interactive. Since we had Spark Cores, the interaction could be open to anyone in the world, not just in the room! So we had buttons, and lights, but what should power them? What invisible force could be shared from across the world and help make everyone's holiday "Jolly"? They should generate and be powered by Holiday Cheer of course!
The build!
We had a pile of Spark Cores around the office, some awesome addressable led strips, and other fun goodies, but you can build your own version with any kind of controllable lighting and a Core or Photon. We connected the LED strip to a power supply, and used jumper wires to connect the control pin to a breadboard with the core on D2, that's it! You can power the core via USB, or if you have a strip like we did, you can jump the strip power tail to a 5v VIN, and GND.
Diving into the software
We started with a very simple red and green base palette, but your project should be as fancy as you want. :) When cheer was detected the lights would go crazy by choosing from the full rgb spectrum, making the lights brighter and closer to a white/blue than the normal red/green.
We detected and distributed cheer using simple published and subscribed messages, so anyone in the world could easily join in on the cheer! Any of the cores around the office when pressed would publish holiday cheer and make the tree go wild.
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