

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

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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>

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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 :)

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joezydeco
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-...](http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/15/microsoft-nerd-reverse-
engineers-christmas-lights-uses-them-as-im-indicators/)

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

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

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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.

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steve_b
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!

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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.

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

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timmaah
<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'

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joezydeco
That's _brilliant_! Nicely done.

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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 :-)

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

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

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

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

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

