Planet Arduino

If you don’t want to bother putting up your own lights this year, you can just control Tom Hammond’s!

As seen on Good Morning America, Hammond recently put up a Christmas display that can be controlled via a simple online interface between the hours of 5pm and midnight (EST). The setup consists of an Arduino Mega along with a Raspberry Pi running Falcon Player, while the animations were created using xLights.

The website offers nine lighting options that anyone can select and play. Thanks to a webcam on Hammond’s property, the page even features a live stream that lets users see the animation they chose in real-time. However, due to the number of people trying to access it, the video is not always available.

Hammond, who lives in Akron, Ohio, told ABC News:

“I wanted people outside of my community to enjoy it. The nicest thing I got was an email from an older lady who lives with her mother who said they couldn’t decorate their house this year and she showed her mom my website and said that was one of the best gifts, that she got to decorate.”

Want a fun holiday distraction? Check out the Internet-connected lights here! You can also look at these other Arduino-powered dazzling displays to help get you in the festive spirit!

There’s nothing like a dazzling display of lights to help get you into the holiday spirit. Every year, enthusiasts share the magic of the season by decorating their homes with artfully strung, animated bulbs, while some Makers take their projects to the next level using open-source hardware.

2016 did not disappoint. A quick Google search revealed a bunch of Arduino-controlled LED shows that you’ll want to see!

Did you deck out your house? Share it below! Also, don’t forget to enter your Internet of Holiday Things projects in our latest contest here.

Reader [pscmpf] really digs the scrolling light look of old marquee signs and as soon as he saw some Christmas lights with G40 bulbs, he was on his way to creating his own vintage-look marquee arrow.

We must agree that those bulbs really do look like old marquee lights or small vanity globes. [pscmpf] started by building, varnishing, and distressing the wooden box to display the lights and house the electronics. He controls the lights with an Arduino Pro and an SSR controller board. The 24 lights are divided into ten sections; each of these has its own solid-state relay circuit built around an MC3042 as the opto-coupler, with a power supply he made from a scrap transformer.

[pscmpf] shares some but not all of his code as it is pretty long. There are five patterns that each play at three different speeds in addition to a continuous ‘on’ state. In his demonstration video after the jump, he runs through all the patterns using a momentary switch. This hack proves that Arduino-controlled Christmas lights are awesome year-round.

Here’s a cool hack to get you in the December holiday mood! Arduino controlled Christmas lights!

It all started because [Anx2k] had some leftover LED’s from one of his other projects, so he decided to make use of them as permanently mounted Christmas lights. He’s installed them underneath his tiled roof, and run all the wires into his attic where he has an electrical box serving as the main control hub. He uses an Arduino Uno to control them, and a 460W computer power supply to provide the juice. The LED modules themselves are Adafruit RGB pixel strings. There’s actually three of the LED modules per tile — two shining up to illuminate the tile, and one shining out.

He’s set up a ton of different patterns to run, and they are pretty awesome! Check out the video after the break.

While it doesn’t look that weather proof, it’s a nice unobtrusive way of putting up lights!

[Thanks for the tip David!]