Networked Christmas Tree Controlled By Twitter 38
An anonymous reader writes "What's Twitter good for? How about crowd sourcing control of your Christmas tree. Dangerous Prototypes built an open source, networked Christmas tree that you can control from Twitter. Send a color or hexadecimal color code to @tweet_tree, then watch the color change on the live video stream. This project is based on an updated version of the open source business card size web server covered previously."
Check out MY networked RGB tree! (Score:5, Interesting)
My tree isn't publicly-networked, but I'm pretty proud of it and love to show it off :-)
Each light has its own microcontroller & RGB led. The lights are autonomous, but can be orchestrated by the controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qR9_8KGPU [youtube.com]
Mbed is much easier. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can do this with an mbed and not need to etch your own PCB or solder SMT components. I got one when they first shipped and let me say they are a pleasure to work with. Ethernet, USB, serial (rs232, SPI, i2c), PWM, Analog in and out as well as digital in and out. Small compact foot print that is DIP compatible. The best pat is it is programed with c++ instead of assembly. You don't need a programmer either as you plug it into any PC (Works with Linux, OSX and Win) via usb and shows up as a 2mb flash disk and you drag and drop the binary to the disk and hit the reset button. The only down side is the compiler is online so its sorta cloud based but there are third party compilers for the ARM Cortex that will work with the mbed.
No I am not paid to plug this device, its just been a while since I had this much fun playing with embedded hardware. http://www.mbed.org/ [mbed.org]