Allowing for brighter, more colourful and easily controllable Christmas decorations, the Raspberry Pi ‘Xmas Pi’ hack lets you adjust lights via web browser.
Christmas is a wonderful time of year and that one song that will likely be blasted over every radio station this holiday season will likely tell you as much. Amongst the succulent cuttings of turkey, the mad dash to the store as you realise you’ve forgotten to buy a present for a rarely seen family member and the giddy happiness at seeing all of the presents under the tree (a feeling that never really dies out no matter how old you get), is the importance of Christmas decorations. Key to these decorations, are the Christmas lights, draped over your choice of real or plastic evergreen like its Sunday best. Now, a Raspberry Pi hack allows you to make your decorations this year even more hi-tech.
To put the Raspberry Pi ‘Xmas Pi’ hack into action, a slight bit of technical know how is required. Also required, the hack’s creator explains, is an Arduino controller and a connection to a Raspberry Pi web server. What you’ll also need is WS2801 RGB Pixels, digitally controllable Christmas lights that are available from the Adafruit website here. The creator of Xmas Pi explains the hack, saying that “The system is made of 3 main components… the interface [the Xmas Pi website] a RaspBerry Pi Webserver and an Arduino controller. In a nutshell, the website (which is hosted somewhere in the internet) sends requests to the Raspberry Pi Webserver which is connected to [the hacker’s] router at home via ethernet. The Pi forwards these commands onto the Arduino sitting next to my Christmas Tree via a Serial link. The Arduino interprets the serial data and controls the electrics to make the lights/train change.”
You can see an image of the hack’s setup above, but you can see it in action and make changes to the lights yourself on the Xmas Pi website.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: Geeky Gadgets
Read more on walyou, 14 Best Looking Cookies to Make on Christmas, 14 Awesome DIY Tree Ornaments For Christmas
