Networked Christmas Tree Controlled By Twitter

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."

xmas

[sopssa]

Why do I feel a little bit of evilness in CmdrTaco's 'ho-ho-ho'...

pinging christmas tree

[sopssa]

Judging from the comments, it seems his christmas tree replies to pings quite fast too

Pinging 192.168.1.126 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.126: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=100
Reply from 192.168.1.126: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=100
Reply from 192.168.1.126: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=100
Reply from 192.168.1.126: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=100

Down with Twitter

[gardel999]

Is it just me or is Twitter the most annoying thing to take off in years?

Re:

[east coast]

No one said you had to use it. For my part? I think Twitter has a ton of possibilities.

Re:

[dumuzi]

So just to clarify, the number of possibilities that Twitter has is approximately 1.0160469088 tonne, or 35.71 bushels (corn), or equivalent to the weight of 5555.5 wamprats, like a small car.

Re:

[peragrin]

twitter has 140^68 possibilities. 140 characters to the power of every possible character on a keyboard. and just like twitter 99% of those possibilities make no sense to sane intelligent people.

Re:

[xmundt]

greetings and salutations...
My only real problems with twitter are these:
a) I am not sure I can say anything of substance in 140 characters...
b) Twitter promotes the idea that anyone else cares about what you are doing every 30 seconds of the day....Trust me...WE DO NOT CARE.
            Merry Christmas
            Dave Mundt

Re:

[OutputLogic]

Isn't it 68^140 possibilities?

Re:

[eln]

Why does it have to be either/or? Both you AND twitter are the most annoying things to take off in years.

oh, you are so gonna get slashdotted...

[xirusmom]

How long until his server crashes? Place your bets here.

Re:oh, you are so gonna get slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry honey, no Christmas this year. The tree was slashdotted.

Re:oh, you are so gonna get slashdotted...

[Megaweapon]

Well it is only running MINIX. Oh Tanenbaum, Oh Tanenbaum...

Re:

[supernova_hq]

I've heard of servers going up in flames from being slashdotted, but this may be the first time in history that slashdot has destroyed something made of WOOD!

All this investment

[hwyhobo]

All this investment just to replace "finger".

Re:

[ickleberry]

why couldn't he just use some UDP based server thing rather than this stupid HTTP-based commercial service that nobody wants to invest in?

Check out MY networked RGB tree!

[Miamicanes]

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]

Re:

[lwsimon]

See, now this is cool. Props, man.

Re:

[speedbiker]

Very Cool. Should give you some bonus points on your geek card :-)

sd

In other news...

[gwdoiron]

a Symantec spokesman announced today that they had found vulnerabilities in the Christmas Tree Webserver. "It's terribly easy to DDOS the tree. I mean, it's using an 8-bit PIC MCU that can only service a dozen or so requests a second. We recommend protecting the Christmas Tree with NAV-XMAS version, or at the very least, putting the tree behind a firewall, as we can't guarantee that the tree won't go up in flames when the next malicious attacker strikes."

Alternately

[Lije Baley]

Oh, say, maybe spend some time with the family in front of your own tree? C'mon now, you can still sing Klingon Christmas carols!

Mbed is much easier.

[LoRdTAW]

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]

Re:

[Yetihehe]

You can do this with an mbed and not need to etch your own PCB or solder SMT components.

Mbed - $66
attiny - $1
Sometimes you just need to control some lights. Yes, it is good for prototyping one light, but when you need 100 lights each with its own controller, simple parts are best.

ugh

[rantingkitten]

What's Twitter good for? How about crowd sourcing control of your Christmas tree.

No, that still doesn't make Twitter good for anything.