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!)
I’ve missed it for this year but there are lots of esp8266 based wifi rgb and rgbw led controllers for about $8 on aliexpress that will get you started on this sort of thing without doing your own hardware.
They’re great! I originally wanted to build my own, but found these instead “done” for me:
https://www.muzik.ca/2016/11/30/hacked-esp8266-rgb-led-controller/
Did something very similar this year with a PiZero and a cloud based app. I definitely like their UI better than my own
I did something similar with a PiZero and a cloud based app. I might have to take some pointers from their UI as there’s flows a bit better than my own.
I’ll have to do this next Christmas :-)