After re-watching season one of Netflix's Stranger Things, I thought it would be neat if I built the xmas lights from the show.
I originally tried to solder individual addressable LEDs so I could stick them in old xmas light bulbs, but very quickly abandoned that idea after spending an hour soldering a total of 3 LEDs.
Eventually I connected an LED strip to an ESP 8266 micro-controller and programmed it to curl an endpoint; any text displayed on the endpoint is processed and the corresponding LED assigned to the letters (A-Z) will flash one at a time.
On the server side, I used a simple flask application combined with redis, allowing users to submit messages with a form. Every time the micro-controller curls the server, a message is popped off the queue and displayed. This ensured all messages sent to me were received, even if I left the controller unplugged.
I posted the project online and received over 8 million views, and tens of thousands of messages (the queue is still not empty almost a month later).
If you're interested in building something simple, I highly recommend it - it's an easy project to get started with and I'm more than happy to share my code.
I also made a quick video on the project if you're interested!
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