After breaking my wrist and decorating my cast as a Buzz Lightyear Cuff using sugru and 3doodler (Blog here), I needed further surgery and a new cast.
Seems my first step is always eyes ...
But it was December. And cheerlights
were beginning to flash across my twitter stream.
A tweet controlled Christmas Tree with lights was required.
I bought an Adafruit Flora, Bluefruit and Neopixels.
I sketched the design on my cast.
I transfered the design onto carboard ...
And stuck the neopixels on with bluetak
Although the neopixels are sewable, as it was going onto a solid cast, I soldered the wires - which also made the shape of the tree and tinsel.
A lithium Ion polymer battery (3.7V 1200mAh) powered the components.
Using evostick contact adhesive, I stuck the soft and fluffy side of velcro to my cast (I thank myself for this at night!) and the prickly side to the components.
The adafruit flora coding was done by the amazing James Macfarlane and is on github here
The Bluefruit connected to my phone via bluetooth using the adafruit app Bluefruit LE.
If there is no bluetooth connection or no input for a while, the lights change randomly.
Using the UART connection, the code also allows for the UART feed to type in a colour.
By connecting the MQTT feed to the cheerlights topic from Andy Stanford-Clark's MQTT feed (mqtt://iot.eclipse.org with the topic cheerlights) the lights respond to tweets (Tweet #cheerlights and a colour).
(This works on android and iphone, but not on ipad1 and the mac app does not have the MQTT feed).
The colour picker from controller also works.
The first outing for my lights was to the Thingmonk conference
Where I and other delegates had a lot of fun!
Top Comments