Interactive Halloween window

With no trick or treating this year I created a fun interactive Halloween display for our front window. I used the vinyl cutter to create Halloween stickers to cover the window. I cut out a cardboard box to make a spooky haunted house. Then I added some lights!

I added 150 strip of WS2812Bs to a Raspberry Pi 3 that also had a camera and an IR transmitter connected. I then added a huge strip of LED lights from Amazon - 10 metres! These lights were controlled using an IR remote so I hacked the remote using the Raspberry Pi.

The windows works as follows:

There are two light strips - the smaller Haunted House light strip directly connected to the Raspberry Pi. It's wrapped around the house in 3 columns. And the store bought 10 metre strip that is controlled using an IR remote - it's wrapped around the entire window.

- The Haunted House constantly plays an animation - it looks like the windows are changing colour

- The store lights glow green

When someone walks past the window on the footpath outside, with a light on:

- the Raspberry Pi camera spots the change in pixels

- It starts to flash the lights - the Haunted House lights directly and using an IR transmitter the store bought lights. They flash red then green.

It took me ages to get everything working! As always when you try to do a project like this most of the code examples are out of date or not quite what you want.

Here's my code:https://github.com/Lorrainbow/HalloweenWindow

You have to attach an IR receiver first to get the right codes for the store bought lights. Instructions are on GitHub

The code is very unique to my lightstrip numbering but maybe people will find it useful. These are the big 10metre strip of lights I bought from Amazon. They come with power supply, remote and can be controlled over Bluetooth. They're not individually addressable but for the Prime day price (£11.99!), I thought they were a pretty good deal.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08B3CRB5B/