RaspberryPi

It’s time to get back to some lighting as I spent a little time enhancing my setup that I left off configuring in Making the Lights Dance. In my Building the RaspberryPi Christmas Light Box post, I blamed a friend for starting me down this path. Once again, I’m blaming a different friend for causing me to wander down the LED lighting road. This friend saw some of my posts regarding the simplistic lighting box I created, and they suggested that I tinker with WS2811 lights. Let the tinkering begin! ...

My previous post, Making the Little Lights Twinkle, covered my coding of the NodeJS server that could take simply relay numbers and command (on|off) and put them to use. Now that I have a server/service up and running, it was time for me to be able to control the lights. I removed my Orchestra of Lights and put my new Raspberry Pi hardware device in its place. The only downside is that my setup has 8 outlets and the Orchestra of Lights only had 6. As I built out some of my light sequences, I noticed there’s a delay due to relays 7 and 8 being triggered but nothing being connected to them. Maybe that’s something I can do for next year. I’ll plan for 8 lighting areas instead of just 6. ...

My previous post, Building the RaspberryPi Christmas Light Box, explained at a hight level building out the hardware. That step was a little scary than I think it should be but it all worked out just fine in the end. Now that I had everything put together and powered on, I was stuck here: pi@raspberrypi:~ $ What are the next steps? I’ve got this box all wired up and ready to go but now I’m just sitting at a prompt waiting. As I mentioned before, I broke this down into a few parts to make my life easier and not get overwhelmed. After doing some more and more reading, I figured I had two options. I could program everything in Python or I could program everything in NodeJS. ...

Disclosure: I have included some affiliate / referral links in this post. There’s no cost to you for accessing these links but I do indeed receive some incentive for it if you buy through them. Let’s Cover Some Background Here I have always enjoyed Christmas lights. For quite some time, I was very intrigued at the notion of putting the lights to music or at least making them dance in motion. About 3 years ago, my wife and I bought a string of lights that had a mind of their own. It was neat to watch it random go through the different patterns of blinking, dancing, and chasing. Last year was the year that we got the really neat ones. They were icicles that changed colors AND danced and chased and more. ...