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Hacking Christmas lights
- 5hoom 15y agoTechnically 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 15y agoThe 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-reverse-engineers-christmas-lights-uses-them-as-im-indicators/ http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/15/microsoft-nerd-...
- thirdhaf 15y agoI 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 15y agoActually, I found palettes (plural) of them at Costco this afternoon. $65.
- unwind 15y agoMicro-nit: you mean "pallets" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet, not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palette).
- jroseattle 15y agoYes, correct. Thank you, Firefox spell-check add-on.
- unwind 15y agoFrom your point of view, I'm actually browser-independent. An amazing value.
- thirdhaf 15y agoFantastic! SF Bay Areay by any chance?
- jroseattle 15y agoSeattle, actually.
- swah 15y agoybox2 is a collaboration with the ladyada: http://www.adafruit.com/products/95 http://www.adafruit.com/products/95
- slug 15y agoThe price surely beats buying/building a bunch of i2c rgb leds ( buy: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8579 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8579 clone: http://hackaday.com/2011/06/22/building-diy-blinkm-clones/ 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 http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoI 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 15y agoYou 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!
- timmaah 15y agoI 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 15y agoPost a video of what it can do. I (I'm sure we) would all love to see it!
- _pius 15y agoEvery now and again you see a post that truly feels like hacker news. This is one of those posts.
- Martijn 15y agohttp://www.evilmadscientist.com/ http://www.evilmadscientist.com/ has lots more of this stuff if you are interested in it.