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. ...

I think I stopped blogging because I just wasn’t quite sure I liked the blogger platform. I guess WordPress is the place to be in the blogging world. After agonizing for a very long time, it seems that it was not time to make the big switch. Turns out, it wasn’t that hard at all. The best thing is that my hosting provider made it totally easy to integrate into my existing infrastructure. On top of that, WordPress has a nice little utility that can migrate your blogger blog write into WordPress. Fancy that! ...

This post focuses on me being lazy. In the previous post, I talked about building a custom image and posting it to the Docker Hub. I have also talked about creating a Git repo and storing everything in it thus far. What if we could make a commit rebuild our image for us? As luck would have it, you can do this! This post is going to focus on making that very simple change to your Docker Hub repository so that every commit causes the image to be rebuilt to the latest. How fun! ...