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!

Arduino Build It! contest entry by: Noel Portugal My xmas-box project consists of an internet controlled Christmas lights and music show. A Christmas song can be requested on-line which is then put in a queue and played in the order it was requested. The music is transmitted on an FM station within a 300 ft radius from my house.

The xmas-box has 8 Channels (power outlets) where different light modes can be played: vu meter style, ascending, descending, split, merge, sequence and random. During each song one of these modes is used randomly every 10 seconds (to make the show less monotonous).I started my research right after Halloween and I came across a couple different options, but I settled with the following combination of hardware : arduino + adafruit wave shield + ioBridge + wifi bridge + solid state relays (SSRs).

The xmas-box is enclosed in a small plastic tool box. I have place it on my deck under a roof ( it is not completely weather proof). The tool box has “3 levels.” The bottom is where all the SSRs and AC wiring are located. The middle (the inside tray) contains the wall warts for the arduino (9v), ioBridge (5v) and Wifi Bridge with power. The top level contains the Arduino board, the ioBridge module and the FM transmitter.

Noel has put together a really great Instructable. Rather than attempt to post all the steps here, the remainder of the project can be found on his Instructable.

Great Job Noel!

As as side note I will like to share how much Arduino has changed my life. I am software guy by trade but I have always wanted to bridge the internet with the real world. When I found out about Arduino I rushed to order one of these amazing boards, and I haven’t been disappointed. The ability to program it using C (with wiring) and the immense documentation and free libraries make it really easy for anyone with little to no experience to get started with physical computing. My head  has been constantly spinning  by all the possibilities that I could prototype with this platform.

I hope that any of my experiences shared by my blog could ever help someone else trying to do similar things.

-Noel