The Santa monitor & lights - (T.I.O.H.L.)part-1

23 Dec 2014

The Internet of Holiday Lights

(The Santa monitor & lights - part-1)

Hello there "Internet of Holiday Lights" road-testers, kids and enthusiasts! Though i wasn't quite able to make an instant blogging after i've first got the kits, hope it is not too late to start describing my whole idea for the "Internet of Holidays Lights" project now. This part will represent the general presentation of the products i'm going to use for this wonderful and interesting project. I've always wanted to catch and see how Santa Claus looked like (the real deal ), so i've initiated a very sneaky plann with the help of the secret element14 technology, to catch Santa once and for all. Let's see whatcha gonna do now Santa!

The "Trio"

Arduino YUN, Arduino UNO and Infineon Lighting RGB LED Arduino shield

The "Lights"

Just a small demo with Arduino Uno + Infineon + I2C Dave demo program for the Christmas sake.

Just bought three affordable & simple rgb led strips operating at 12V. On a closer inspection, each led was seried with a 561 ohm resistor and each strip used a common "+" and three "-" pins. I got to light the strips easily with a 1 Amp/12V DC transformer that was lying around my desk. All the led's seemed to be ok (no faulty one - though it was of RPC product). These lights will be controlled and triggered by Infineon shield and Arduino YUN/UNO - i will try to make use of IOT Eclipse platform, thanks to kartben's good example.

The "Hook up"

Oh man, decisions...decisions. Finally got up to the idea that combining male and female pin headers would be a decent fix for the height issue in Arduino YUN/Infineon shield hook up.

The "Call?"

No pictures available in this section yet, though the idea is to use sensors to trigger a "melody" when Santa is close to the door and if it snows. I was initially thinking in using a "hohoho" circuit for proximity sensor and a "slow chillout carol" when it starts to snow for the laser/ir sensor. These sensors will be controlled by Arduino UNO. The bad news is that snow will come here by the late of january...hope soon enough to get the demonstration going before final call of the roadtest.

The "Who/Where?"

First of all i would like to decorate some windows giving the fact that the led strips have sticker tape on them, then an aquarium or a lamp (couldn't find yet a decent priced aquarium - it's possible to go for a vibe lamp if i can't pull that other one off). As for the exact location of the deployment of my project, i'm not quite sure right now, as i have many options to take into account. Here are some suggestions though: