Party On! Party Off!

When the weekend has finally arrived and you are planning a blowout party with some of your best buds to unwind and forget about the week that came before, what is the best way to invite them? Give them each a call? Send a group text? Sure, why not. Why not if you are hoping for a sea of pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses to stream through your front door, that is.

Not that there is anything wrong with pocket protectors or horn-rimmed glasses, of course. We are very engineer-friendly here at Hackster News. But if you had more of a lampshade-on-the-head kind of a night in mind than a Dungeons and Dragons one, then you need to send the right signals. And a plain old, boring text message invitation is going to lead to a plain old, boring party that wraps up by nine o’clock so that no one has to drive home in the dark.

What then will send the right vibes to get your guests on the same page as you? An electronics hobbyist that goes by the handle DuncanEyedaho on Reddit has a solution that is sure to send the message “It’s party time! Excellent!” to all the soon-to-be partiers. He has created a remote-controlled rock and roll Bat-Signal that will alert the crew it is time to put on their dancing shoes and turn the volume up to eleven. Do not pass go and do not collect $200, the party is now!

DuncanEyedaho has a home automation system setup with Indigo, and configured it such that by flipping a switch in his workshop, it will set a variable to indicate that it is time to party. He then handed out devices built around an ESP32 development board to his friends in the neighborhood. This device connects to the Internet via WiFi to regularly check the party time variable stored at Indigo.

When the time is right, the ESP32 will trigger what appears to be a DFRobot DFPlayer, which can play MP3s stored on an SD card. In this case, it plays some loud rock riffs to get the neighbor’s attention. But that is not all — it also trips an optocoupler that turns on a Bat-Signal, which projects DuncanEyedaho’s logo on the ceiling through a Fresnel lens. And it just keeps on going and going and going, until the neighbor responds to let DuncanEyedaho know whether or not they are coming. Since DuncanEyedaho has that magic party switch in his workshop, and can flip it any time day or night, we think it would be wise to accept the invitation.

There are not a lot of details about this project yet, so we hope DuncanEyedaho will provide some more information about the build in the future. However, this is not an especially challenging project, so it should not be too difficult for most people to replicate with a little effort. Head on over to check out the post on Reddit and party on!