'Tis the Season for Simulated Icicle Lighting
Up your front porch decoration game with Phillip Burgess' Adafruit-powered lighting system.
As I write this here in Florida, we can only imagine what natural outdoor ice looks like during the winter, and in the southern hemisphere, this phenomenon won’t appear in most places for another ~6 months. Nonetheless, snow and icy weather has always symbolized the holiday season, so why not celebrate with simulated dripping icicles via this excellent project from Adafruit and Phil Burgess.
The build is a remix of the “OOZE MASTER 3000," which features NeoPixels dripping simulated green slime down a dragon’s skull, using realistic physics. That project was originally inspired by unrealistic Christmas meteor lights, and it seems things have come full circle. Instead of green for ooze, this one mimics water running down NeoPixel icicles with white light. As Burgess shows in the Twitter video below, however, you could also make it red, or whatever other color you like for a rather different effect.
The system is powered by an Adafruit Feather M0 board, along with a NeoPXL8 FeatherWing, though different types of hardware could certainly be adapted for this concept. In addition to the seven top NeoPixel icicles that simulated water slides down, there’s an eighth strip below that produces a "splat" effect, shining the appropriate LED for a short amount of time after the drop hits.