Tis’ the season. CheerLights season! This might be my favorite time of year. I love seeing people build IoT projects, share their experiences, and control the lights around the world. I love checking the daily action in our community over at Discord.
Borrowing ideas from my Lofi Girl CheerLights Shadowbox project, George and I made a CheerLights Gift for under our Christmas tree. This gift changes color based on the latest CheerLights color and anyone on Twitter or Discord can change its color and the color of all of the other CheerLights projects.
The CheerLights Gift project is based on the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W and NeoPixel string lights for illumination. The Plasma Stick ships with CheerLights code main MicroPython file, so all you have to do is change the Wi-Fi network name and password. The microcontroller makes a request to the ThingSpeak API to get the latest CheerLights color, sets the color of the NeoPixel LED lights, waits 10 seconds, and repeats. This is about the fastest way to build your own CheerLights display.
I used a metal gift box that I found in a craft store to house the lights and controller. All we needed to do was stuff the LEDs inside and glue them in place. I only burned my fingers twice.
The project turned out well and kept my five-year-old’s interest for the duration of the build. I was happy that the Plasma Stick 2040 W made it really easy to get the project going.
Join the CheerLights IoT community at CheerLights.com.