Hacking Christmas lights

[jroseattle]

http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/

[slug]

The price surely beats buying/building a bunch of i2c rgb leds ( buy: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8579 clone: http://hackaday.com/2011/06/22/building-diy-blinkm-clones/ )

It also reminds me of the christmas lights webcam, controlled from the web: http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam

[_pius]

Every now and again you see a post that truly feels like hacker news. This is one of those posts.

[Martijn → _pius]

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/ has lots more of this stuff if you are interested in it.

[ImprovedSilence]

I love seeing hacks like this. And one can always pick up something awesome. Also, I never heard of Saleae logic before, but now, I must have it.

[steve_b → ImprovedSilence]

You will not be disappointed by the Saleae logic. Almost everyday I'm amazed by how beautiful and useful it is. My Logic16's in the mail!

[5hoom]

Technically brilliant and completely ridiculous, this really is in the spirit of old-school hacking.

My favourite bit was the author describing how the none of the lights have their brightness value set above 0xCC by the manufacturer, and while the lights accept brightness values up to 0xFF:

"I don't recommend it unless you really know what you are doing. It was probably set to this for a reason" (as if any of this should be attempted unless you really know what you are doing!).

I must confess I had never thought of controlling my christmas lights via webbrowser either. Fun stuff :)

[joezydeco → 5hoom]

The last time this link showed up, some guy had hacked them to show Live Messenger contact status out of Lync. Now that's a good hack:

http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/15/microsoft-nerd-...

[timmaah]

I have 98 of these in a box on my wall...

You can "control" it via a web app running node.js. Had a bunch of kids over this weekend who loved playing with it.

[jamesbressi → timmaah]

Post a video of what it can do. I (I'm sure we) would all love to see it!

[timmaah → jamesbressi]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXahEYJX9-g

Me drawing some grass, sky, sun then house on the ipad.

The box on the wall is 2' by 4'

[joezydeco → timmaah]

That's brilliant! Nicely done.

[thirdhaf]

I really wanted to use these exact lights for a giant display in some friends' Burning Man camp this year but the G-35's are pretty much impossible to find at the moment. These lights are on my wish list for Christmas :-)

[jroseattle → thirdhaf]

Actually, I found palettes (plural) of them at Costco this afternoon. $65.

[unwind → jroseattle]

Micro-nit: you mean "pallets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet, not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palette).

[jroseattle → unwind]

Yes, correct. Thank you, Firefox spell-check add-on.

[unwind → jroseattle]

From your point of view, I'm actually browser-independent. An amazing value.

[thirdhaf → jroseattle]

Fantastic! SF Bay Areay by any chance?

[jroseattle → thirdhaf]

Seattle, actually.

[swah]

ybox2 is a collaboration with the ladyada: http://www.adafruit.com/products/95