Integrating CheerLights into a Holiday Display

CheerLights is a project by Hans Charler that allows your lights to be controlled by Twitter tweets. Anytime somebody tweets to twitter to @CheerLights with a color, all the CheerLights around the world will change to that color. This section will help you brush up on your soldering skills, navigate portions of the ESP8266 breakout board, and encourage creative building of LEDs into a variety of items.

In this chapter, we will create a festive holiday display that is triggered by festive cheers sent to you by your friends.

We will discuss the following topics:

• Items required for this project
• Getting the CheerLights code set up
• Connecting it all together
• Programming the ESP8266 Huzzah for CheerLights

Items required for this project

You will need the following materials for this project:

• Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout
• One USB FTDI connector
• Two WS2811 NeoPixels LED strips
• Two 5V and 3.3V (optional) power supplies
• Two 1000μF capacitors
• Two logic level shifting ICs
• Three 400-600Ω resistor 3 JST SM or JST PH connectors (optional)

Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 breakout

Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 is a Wi-Fi microcontroller based on the Arduino IDE and it's one of the many ways in which you can create a CheerLights display. Note that you may choose to create a CheerLights display in scores of different controller types; however, for the purpose of this chapter, we will be using the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 for the...

Getting the CheerLights code set up

In this section, we will set up our CheerLights code and deploy it to the ESP8266 Huzzah.

Set up the Arduino IDE

The Arduino IDE is a free IDE provided by https://www.arduino.cc/ that makes it easy to write and deploy code on Arduino and Arduino-based boards like the ESP8266. It's written in Java and it supports Windows, GNU/LINUX, and macOS. Before we start, you must install the Arduino IDE from the following link. You might have to select the correct version for your OS.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/main/software

If you already have the Arduino IDE, make sure its version is higher than 1.6.4.

By default, the Arduino IDE doesn’t support the ESP8266. The Arduino IDE needs to be...

Connecting it all together

Adafruit the NeoPixels LED strip has three inputs: GND, V+ (or VIN) and DIN (or Digital Input). The ordering of the inputs may differ depending on when and who you order the strip from. Follow these steps:

1. First connect the capacitor and power supply in parallel.
2. Connect the 1000μF capacitor in parallel across the 5V power supply. If your multimeter supports capacitance measurement and 1000μF is within the measuring range, you may use it to verify the capacitance of your capacitor.

3. Connect up the grounds next. Connect the power supply ground to the LED strip ground, to the 74AHCT125 ground and the 10E pins, and to ground on the ESP8266. If you have a 3.3V supply, connect the grounds of the two power supplies as well.

Connecting the data...

Programming the ESP8266 Huzzah for CheerLights

In this section, we will learn how to program the ESP8266 Huzzah to link up with the CheerLights API and talk to NeoPixels.

Let's try a simple single-color display

We are almost done with our funky networked blinking lights now; all we need to do is program the ESP8266 with the CheerLights code. For this, connect the ESP8266 with your computer again and switch back to the Arduino IDE:

1. Include the libraries: The first thing we need to do in the code is include the libraries we will need. We need the Adafruit NeoPixel library and ESP8266WiFi library. Start with including these libraries:

        /* CheerLights
         * Let the world set your LED strip's color using...

Summary

CheerLights is a fun and simple collaborative project to start with in your home automation journey. In this chapter, we also learned how to control NeoPixels, which are individually addressable LEDs. What you can do with the NeoPixels is only limited by your imagination. The NeoPixels are ridiculously easy to control and they can be used for some interesting automation projects. Some more practical applications can be to indicate system status of server racks on your workstation desk or to create floating ticker boards. Let your imagination run wild and share what you create!

In the next chapter, we are going to learn how to create a parking space monitor to automatically alert you when your designated parking space is occupied using a machine learning system to ease your vehicle parking headaches. Excited? Read on to learn more.

Cheers!

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