It’s December, which means that houses across the world put up massive displays of lights so that Santa will have visibility to land on their roofs. It’s been a few years since I’ve decorated, and with all of the recent improvements in the realm of the Internet of Things, I’ve found myself going the tech route to show my holiday spirit.
Brains
There have been enormous improvements in the realm of remote controlled lights and other electronics, which lowered costs for small scale projects like mine. For roughly $15, I bought 2 remote controlled outlet plugs. These aren’t Wi-Fi enabled like many of the newer ones, but instead use a handheld wireless remote. (The remote doesn’t work at a very far distance, but that doesn’t matter because all of these devices are in the same room, and I’m cracking it open anyway!) I soldered wires to the switches in the remote and plugged them all into an Arduino, which is a small electronics controller that you can use for everything from blinking lights to watering your plants (another fun project I’m working on). I wrote a simple program that switches lights on and off at random intervals.
I put these plugs in my living room, connected $5 LED Christmas light strings to them and set the Arduino to cycle through, creating a wonderful Christmas time twinkle. I ended up lowering the rate at which they twinkle, as the switches make a slight audible click when they turn on or off. In the future I’ll probably replace them with custom built outlets that are quieter, but that’s for another time.
Fun time!
This project ended up costing me about $25 and works great. However, I have already been thinking about what to do when it’s not Christmas season. Long ago I purchased an Ethernet adapter for Arduinos, with the hope of making something similar. I wired it up and have been taking it for a spin. My end goal is to use these outlets throughout the year, plugging my floor lamp and other devices into them, and controlling them remotely through a phone application. I’ll be sure to post updates when I do! For now, I have a command line program I can run to change the frequency of the blinking on the fly, or to turn them all on or off.
It’s true that I could have bought blinking LED light strands for roughly the same price as this whole project, but that would have left me with a seasonal decoration, and I had way more fun building this from scratch!