The TV is a Magnavox portable from Facebook Marketplace, a Perfect View from August 1987, the kind with a handle on top, a rod antenna, and a 12V jack so you could watch it in the car.

The Pi is a 3 Model B+, the same board the reader had.

The false start: the original 2012 Pi

My first instinct was to do this on the least capable Pi in the house: the original Model B, board marked “(c)2011.12”, with the 4GB “Debian 6 for Linux” card it came with. Raspberry Pi OS still supports it, which is remarkable for a 2012 computer, and Node.js 20 installs from apt. The server half of CABLE 82 would run fine.

The TV half would not. The original Pi’s chip is ARMv6, and no current browser runs on it. Raspberry Pi dropped Chromium for ARMv6 in 2023; on the current OS it prints “This hardware doesn’t support NEON SIMD extensions” and quits. Firefox is built for ARMv7 and dies the same way. The one engine left is WebKit, with no JavaScript JIT, on a 700MHz core. I looked at that path for a while… and decided the tutorial should be about the channel, not about heroics.

What you need

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (or any Pi 2 or newer; a Pi 4 is a fine choice too).
• 16GB or larger microSD card. Mine is a SanDisk Ultra PLUS 16GB.
• Micro-USB power supply, 5V at 2.5A. The 3 B+ is the last micro-USB Pi.
• A network connection. Ethernet is simplest for the first boot; the 3 B+ also has Wi-Fi.
• 4:3 CRT with a coax antenna input. Almost every tube TV has one, which is why this is the path that works for everybody. Mine has nothing else: one F connector marked EXT ANT and a switch to pick it over the built-in rod antenna.
• HDMI-to-RF modulator, the little box that turns HDMI into channel 3 or 4 on the antenna input, plus a short coax cable. Mine is an “HDM61” unit; the same design is sold under a dozen brand names.
• Another computer to flash the card and to SSH into the Pi (needs to be on the same network as the Raspberry Pi).

Step 1: Put the OS on the card

Which image, and why

Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit), the desktop edition. It is the image Raspberry Pi’s own kiosk tutorial tells you to use, and there are two practical reasons to follow that advice on a 3 B+:

1. Chromium is the browser that will show the channel, and the 64-bit build is the one that has been solid on Pi 3 boards (the 32-bit build had a will-not-start bug on the Pi 3 as recently as this summer).
2. Node.js 22 from NodeSource is 64-bit only now; their installer refuses 32-bit outright.

The image is a 1.3GB download and takes about 6GB on the card, so 16GB leaves plenty of room.

Flash it with Raspberry Pi Imager

Raspberry Pi Imager is the right tool here, and not balenaEtcher or dd, because it can bake the hostname, your user, and SSH into the card before the Pi ever boots. That is what makes the headless setup work. Install it from raspberrypi.com/software, put the card in your computer, and walk the steps down the left side.

Device: Raspberry Pi 3. This filters the OS list to images that run on the 3 family (A+, B, B+, and Compute Module 3).

OS: Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit). The top entry, marked Recommended. Not the 32-bit one and not the “Legacy” one; Legacy is the older Bookworm release.

Storage: the SD card. Imager hides your system drives by default, so the only thing in the list should be the card. Mine shows up as a 14.8GB “Generic MassStorageClass USB Device” because it is in a USB reader; a 16GB card really is about 14.8GB once you count the way computers count.

Customisation. This is the part Etcher cannot do, and the reason the Pi will come up on the network with no screen attached.

• Hostname: cable82. That gives you cable82.local later, so you never have to go looking for an IP address.
• Localisation: your time zone and keyboard layout. The clock on the channel runs off the Pi’s time zone, so get this right.
• User: a username and password you will remember. You will type them into SSH in a few minutes.
• Wi-Fi: your network name and password. I set it even though the Pi would be on Ethernet for the build; it means the finished TV can live anywhere in the house.
• Remote access: enable SSH, password authentication. I also left Raspberry Pi Connect on, which gives you a browser-based remote shell to the Pi from anywhere, handy for a TV that lives in a corner.

Then Write. Imager asks once more whether it can erase the card, downloads the image, writes it, and verifies it. The write was the slow part: this card takes data at about 10MB/s, so the 6GB image plus verification took about fifteen minutes.

First boot

Imager ejects the card when it is done. Card into the Pi, Ethernet in, power in. The green light flickers for a while: the first boot resizes the filesystem to fill the card, generates SSH keys, and runs a one-time setup pass. Mine answered on the network in well under two minutes. Then from your computer:

ssh yourname@cable82.local

(If .local does not resolve on your machine, your router’s device list will show a cable82 with an IP address; SSH to that instead.)

Three things to check while you are in:

head -2 /etc/os-release
free -m
df -h /

Mine came back Debian 13 (trixie), 905MB of memory with about 570MB available, and a 15GB root partition with 8.4GB free after the 6GB image. The Pi had been up eight minutes by the time I got around to asking. Then bring the image current:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

(sudo asks for your password; recent Raspberry Pi OS releases turned off passwordless sudo by default.)

The Pi is on the network, current, and answering SSH.

Step 2: Node.js

CABLE 82 is a Node.js app with no dependencies, so Node is the only thing to install. It needs Node 18 or newer, and a fresh Raspberry Pi OS has none at all:

$ node -v
bash: node: command not found

That line, by the way, is almost certainly what was behind the reader’s “localhost refused to connect.” No Node, no server, nothing listening, and the browser reports it as a refused connection.

Two ways to get Node on a 64-bit Pi. The quick one is the distro’s own package, sudo apt install nodejs, which gives you Node 20. I went with NodeSource for Node 22, the current long-term-support line, and it is two commands:

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
node -v

Mine printed v22.23.2. (NodeSource only builds for 64-bit now; if you flashed the 32-bit image, use the apt route.)

Step 3: CABLE 82 on the air

With Node in place, the channel itself is next. Clone it and start it:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/nothans/cable-82
cd cable-82
node server.js

It prints every address it answers on:

CABLE 82 broadcasting
  http://localhost:1982   (a browser on this machine)
  http://192.168.68.93:1982   (a browser on another device on your network)
Control room: http://localhost:1982/config

Read that second line carefully, because it is the other half of the reader’s problem. localhost means “this machine.” Typed into a browser on your laptop, it asks the laptop for a channel it does not have. The 192.168.x.x address is the Pi as seen from everywhere else on your network, and that is the one to open from the laptop. I did, and the channel was there: blue screen, the clock, the crawl.

The first run also writes a config.json next to the server, which is where everything you change in the control room ends up. Open http://192.168.68.93:1982/config from the laptop and make it yours: channel name, your messages, your feeds, your town for the weather. Save, and the channel picks it up within about twenty seconds.

Make it a service

Ctrl-C the server and hand it to systemd so it runs at boot and restarts if it ever dies. Create /etc/systemd/system/cable82.service:

[Unit]
Description=CABLE 82
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /home/cable82/cable-82/server.js
Restart=always
User=cable82

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Both cable82s are my username; use yours (whoami tells you, and which node confirms the path on the ExecStart line). Then:

sudo systemctl enable --now cable82
systemctl status cable82

active (running) with the broadcasting lines in its log, and sudo journalctl -u cable82 -f is where to look if anything is ever wrong. The server sits at about 46MB of memory.

Step 4: Chromium in kiosk mode

The desktop image already logs in automatically and starts a Wayland session (the compositor is called labwc; the old LXDE desktop from earlier Pi OS releases is gone). Chromium 151 is preinstalled. All we have to do is tell the session to open Chromium full screen on the channel at login.

The file for that is ~/.config/labwc/autostart. Create it with these lines:

# CABLE 82 kiosk: wait for the channel server, then put Chromium on it full screen.
until curl -s -o /dev/null http://localhost:1982; do sleep 1; done
/usr/bin/lwrespawn /usr/bin/chromium http://localhost:1982   --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --no-first-run --no-memcheck   --disable-lcd-text --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required   --enable-features=OverlayScrollbar --password-store=basic --start-maximized &

A few of those deserve a word:

• The until curl loop waits for the server to answer before launching the browser. Without it, Chromium can win the race at boot and show “localhost refused to connect” on the TV, and nothing ever tells it to try again.
• lwrespawn is a Raspberry Pi helper that restarts a program if it dies, so a crash brings the channel back instead of leaving a blank desktop.
• --no-memcheck stops Chromium from popping a low-memory warning over the channel on a 1GB board.
• --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required lets the background music start without anyone clicking.
• --disable-lcd-text turns off subpixel font smoothing so the chunky text stays crisp white instead of going pink at the edges.
• --password-store=basic keeps the desktop keyring from asking for a password at login.

Then turn off screen blanking, or the TV goes dark after ten minutes:

sudo raspi-config nonint do_blanking 1

(Or interactively: sudo raspi-config > Display Options > Screen Blanking > No.)

If you are here from the original post: the chromium-browser --kiosk line and the /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart file in that post were for the previous Pi OS release. On Trixie the binary is chromium and the file is the labwc one above.

Reboot. About a minute later Chromium was running full screen on the channel. I could tell from the laptop before the TV was even connected:

$ pgrep -a chromium | head -1
1407 /usr/lib/chromium/chromium ... --kiosk ... http://localhost:1982

Check the power supply while you are here

This section wasn’t what I expected. My first run was off a phone charger…

$ vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0xd0005
$ vcgencmd measure_clock arm
frequency(48)=600064000

Any bit set in get_throttled is a complaint; 0x5 means under-voltage and throttling right now, and the clock line shows a 1.4GHz Pi running at 600MHz. It worked, in the sense that the channel was on, but at less than half speed. With a proper 5V 2.5A supply the under-voltage bits cleared and the clock came back up. If you only run one check from this whole post on an existing Pi, run that one.

(On a 3 B+ you may still see 0x80008 with a 1.2GHz clock: that is the board’s own soft temperature limit at 60C, normal with Chromium running, and nothing to do with power.)

Step 5: The CRT

Note on photos of the TV… it turns out to be surprisingly hard to get a good photo of the screen. My phone didn’t capture it well. Also, the screen had a giant smudge backed into the acrylic covering the TV. I had to use Novus 2 polish to clean up the smudge and scratches. I assure you that it looks better in person…

The Magnavox has exactly one way in: an F connector marked EXT ANT.

So the path is HDMI out of the Pi into a small HDMI-to-RF modulator, coax from the modulator into the TV, and the TV tuned to channel 3. The box is the size of a cassette tape, takes USB power, has a CH3/CH4 switch, and its spec sheet says everything you need to know: NTSC out, 480p to 1080p in, sound on the 4.5MHz carrier (that means mono, the way 1982 did it).

Plug it all in and the channel was on the tube.

Send it a 4:3 picture

The box scales whatever it gets to fill the 4:3 tube. CABLE 82 draws a 4:3 stage, so if the Pi sends a widescreen mode, the stage gets squashed. The Pi has to output 640×480. On current Raspberry Pi OS the old hdmi_group and hdmi_mode lines in config.txt are dead; the kernel takes its orders from cmdline.txt, and the desktop then picks its own mode on top of that. So it takes two small files.

Append to the end of the single long line in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt:

video=HDMI-A-1:640x480@60D vc4.force_hotplug=1

The D forces the output on even when nothing answers, and force_hotplug keeps it on if the modulator never raises the hotplug pin (mine does not). Then pin the desktop to the same mode in ~/.config/kanshi/config:

profile crt {
  output HDMI-A-1 mode 640x480 position 0,0
}

Without that second file, the desktop on my Pi happily chose 1024×768 on top of the kernel’s 640×480.

Give it an EDID, so there is sound

The first picture had no audio, and the reason is a good one: cheap modulators send no EDID, the little data block a screen uses to introduce itself. No EDID means the Pi does not know the “screen” can hear, and it refuses to send HDMI audio at all. So I made it one. The CABLE 82 repo now ships a 256-byte EDID that describes a 640×480 4:3 screen with stereo audio (edid/cable82-640x480-audio.bin, with the script that generates it). Hand it to the kernel:

sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/edid
sudo cp ~/cable-82/edid/cable82-640x480-audio.bin /lib/firmware/edid/cable82.bin

and add one more parameter to that same cmdline.txt line:

drm.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/cable82.bin

Reboot. wpctl status now lists an HDMI sink next to the headphone jack; make it the default and give it some level (WirePlumber remembers):

wpctl status                       # find the "(HDMI)" sink's number
wpctl set-default <number>
wpctl set-volume <number> 0.8

The channel’s music came out of the Magnavox’s speaker on the next page turn.

Hide the cursor

A mouse pointer sat in the middle of the picture with no mouse attached. The HDMI CEC input counts as a pointer device, so the desktop draws one. The fix is a labwc keybinding that hides it, pressed automatically after boot. Copy /etc/xdg/labwc/rc.xml to ~/.config/labwc/rc.xml, add inside <keyboard>:

<keybind key="A-W-h"><action name="HideCursor"/></keybind>

then sudo apt install wtype and add to the end of ~/.config/labwc/autostart:

(sleep 10; wtype -M alt -M logo -P h -p h -m logo -m alt) &

The detour: composite

Before the HDMI modulator arrived I tried the other way in: the Pi’s 3.5mm AV jack, a 4-pole cable to yellow/red/white, and an old composite-to-RF adapter. On a Pi 3 that means sudo raspi-config nonint do_composite 0, which turns HDMI off; on every Pi before the 5 it is one or the other. The Wayland desktop also does not trust the composite connector until it is told the mode, so video=Composite-1:720x480@60ie,tv_mode=NTSC goes on the cmdline.txt line too.

Step 6: Make it readable

With everything working, the verdict on a 9-inch 1987 tube over RF: the big clock and the crawl read fine, the small text was marginal, and the red and blue pages were worse than the cyan one. That is NTSC. It smears saturated color, it clips pure white (broadcast engineers kept white at 90% for a reason), and the hard drop shadow under every character turned into ringing.

So I added a CRT set of settings in the control room for much older TVs…

• CRT mode swaps in a softer palette (less saturated backgrounds, 90% white) and drops the drop shadow.
• Text size enlarges the body text, kicker, crawl, and the small header lines, from 1 to 1.5x. I run 1.25 on this set; the big clock stays as it is.
• Overscan safe margin was already there; raise it if the TV crops the edges.

Turning text size up found one more thing: at 640×480 the weather card no longer fit and its HI/LO line slid under the crawl.

So pages now fit themselves: if the content would overflow, the weather card gives up its sunrise/sunset line first, then shrinks just enough, and a long fact does the same.

All of that is in the repo as of this post.

What changed because of this build

Three things fed straight back into the project:

• The original post now carries a dated update: the kiosk command is chromium in ~/.config/labwc/autostart on current Raspberry Pi OS, and the power supply got the mention it earned.
• The repo README was rewritten from this build, step by step as tested, with a Troubleshooting section keyed to the exact errors from the comment thread.
• CABLE 82 itself gained CRT mode, the text size setting, the fit-to-page behavior, and the shipped EDID, because a real 1987 tube demanded all four.

That is the part I did not expect when a reader said “localhost refused to connect”: the failure report turned into the best test pass the project ever had!

A channel of your own

The Magnavox sits there now, tuned to channel 3, being a channel. The clock, the bake-sale energy, the crawl, the beautiful-music bed coming out of a mono speaker that was built when the music was new. It is a thirty-nine-year-old TV showing a channel that stopped existing before the TV was built, fed by a computer the size of a deck of cards, and the whole thing works because somebody left a comment saying it did not.

So: if you build one and it refuses to connect, say so. That is how this channel gets better, and it is very 1982 of you. Thanks.

The results are gorgeous! I learned a lot and will share more of the details when I get time. You can follow the live build here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/atari-superman-playfield-wall-art

Inserts and Plastics

When I got the playfield home, I realized that I didn’t have the complete playfield. I only had the wood and the printed art. Every insert, plastic piece, and post was removed. The original owner was planning a playfield restoration and had stopped at some point. The artwork was touched up and looked beautiful, but probably would not work for playing pinball on it. The inserts were going to be important since my goal was to place an LED behind them to make them glow.

I put out a post on Pinside looking for any old parts for the Atari Superman Pinball and got a few bites.

Soon enough, I got the original parts for this exact playfield. I got to meet up with the pinhead that donated the playfield to the museum. We chatted for hours about 70s and 80s pinball, swapped stories, and made a community connection. It was surreal to find the original owner, but the pinball community is a small niche hobby.

I also found the original Superman plafield plastic pieces. They shined right up with Novus Plastic Polish. The Novus cleaning products are a must if you work on pinball machines.

To mount the plastic pieces on the playfield, you need post mounts and post stud screws. The mounts were easy to find, but the stud screws were a challenge. New ones were about a dollar each. So, this didn’t scale well. I needed like 60 of them, so if my math is right, that’s $60. I turned to eBay and found someone selling “pounds of old pinball parts”. This came in at $90! Look at the savings. Somehow, I felt better about buying old used parts than buying new ones at a lower price… and in the process, I got a bunch of rusty parts I didn’t even need.

My old screw bucket was not happy that I bought someone else’s old screw bucket and didn’t even consult it.

Mounting all of the playfield parts took a lot of time, but you just do one at a time. I have a new respect for anyone who designs these things. 70s pinball was so much simpler than modern pinball machines, and it was still a lot of parts to track.

Flippers

I wanted to complete the top side of the playfield with flippers. So, I took old flippers from my Strikes and Spares pinball machine and cut them down for this build. Again, this will be wall-mounted, so you can’t have things sticking out too far in the back. They needed to be modded, and Dremel came to the rescue. Shooting a 6-foot stream of sparks across the room.

LED Control and CheerLights

Of course, it is connected to the CheerLights project. This was going to happen 100% of the time whenever I connected 150 LEDs to something. I used WS2811 bullet-style LEDs that you can control one at a time. They fit perfectly in the 12.5mm general illumination holes in the playfield. I used a WLED controller and a 3A power supply to control the colors, animations, and synchronization with the CheerLights MQTT server.

The insert near the flippers stays in sync with the latest CheerLights color while the rest of the inserts can have their own color or visual effects.

Out of the box, the best animation effect was Stream 2. This very much looks like an attract mode on a pinball machine.

3D Models

Part of the project was making my first 3D model to have the original pop bumpers mounted above the playfield but not connected to the original mechanism. Since this is wall art, I can’t have a mechanism sticking out 7 inches on the back. I also could not find the old-style pop bumpers on Maker World, so I designed my own… ish. Meaning it is not a pop bumper for function, it is a pop bumper to take light from an LED and let it shine through. I just published my first model!

For other parts needed, I found a person on Pinside who created a system called PinGlow. They were way ahead of me and had thought through the kind of stuff you are going to need for a wall art project like mine. They offer drop targets, stand-up targets, wall mounting kits, and even LEDs. I reached out to them on Pinside, and they offered to make a custom version of their drop targets specifically for the Atari Pinball machine. These drop targets had the Superman logo on them.

Project Demo

You might know the one if you watched MTV when it first came on cable. A flat blue screen, chunky white text, the time and the temperature in the corner. The Lions Club pancake breakfast. A birthday wish for someone named STEVE. Little League signups at the rec center. Headlines crawling along the bottom while a Muzak version of a song you almost recognized played underneath. I remember watching it for long stretches, waiting for the flea market notice to come back around. Our Sears CRT had the blue bars burnt in.

At some point, the Cable Bulletin Board Channel disappeared from all of our lives. NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT IT.

Recently, I have been spending evenings learning about retro gaming and reading posts on Reddit saying that you have to game on a CRT for the proper gaming experience. This led me to Facebook Marketplace. After a few weeks of looking at photos of TVs this got me remembering the big honker in our living room… then, I uncovered a repressed memory. I had to have it back in my life.

Meet CABLE 82

CABLE 82 is a tiny web app that turns any screen into your own 1982 community bulletin board channel. Ideally that screen is an old 4:3 CRT fed by a Raspberry Pi, sitting in the corner of a room, being ambient.

It scrolls the date and time, your community messages, fun facts, dad jokes, live weather, and headlines from whatever RSS feeds you point it at. There is a crawl along the bottom, a red LATEST flag, and a little station bug in the corner, because of course there is.

You make it yours in a control room in the browser, or by editing one plain config file. It is free and open source and it runs on a Raspberry Pi.

The rest of this post is how to get it going on a Raspberry Pi and a CRT.

Step 1: Get it on the air

SSH into the Pi, or just open a terminal on it, and run:

git clone https://github.com/nothans/cable-82
cd cable-82
node server.js

Open http://localhost:1982 in a browser on the Pi. You’re on the air.

Out of the box it already looks right: the blue screens, the clock, a couple of example bake-sale messages, and real headlines pulled from a few default feeds.

Step 2: Make it your channel

Everything about the channel lives in one place. Open the control room at http://localhost:1982/config and you get the whole thing on one screen: the name, your community messages, which RSS feeds to pull, your town’s weather, the colors, the page lineup. Change something, hit Save, and the channel updates itself within about twenty seconds. Nobody has to touch the TV.

If you would rather edit a file, it all lives in config.json, and you can hand-edit that just as happily. Put your own town in the weather. Drop in the feeds you actually read. Write the messages your household needs to see, which in my house is mostly reminders that trash day is tomorrow.

Step 3: Run it on boot

You do not want to SSH in and start a server every time the power blips. Make it a service so the Pi just comes up broadcasting.

Create /etc/systemd/system/cable82.service:

[Unit]
Description=CABLE 82
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /home/pi/cable-82/server.js
Restart=always
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then turn it on:

sudo systemctl enable --now cable82

Now the channel is always running in the background, whether anything is looking at it or not.

Step 4: Point a browser at it, full screen

Have the Pi launch Chromium in kiosk mode, pointed at the channel:

chromium-browser --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars \
  --disable-lcd-text \
  --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required \
  http://localhost:1982

Two of those flags earn their keep. --disable-lcd-text turns off subpixel font smoothing, which otherwise tints the chunky white text a faint pink on some screens. --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required lets the background music start on its own at boot, so nobody has to click anything to get the beautiful-music bed going.

While you are in there, turn off screen blanking so the picture never sleeps: sudo raspi-config > Display Options > Screen Blanking > No.

Step 5: Get it onto a real CRT

The easiest and most reliable hookup works on any Pi and any TV with a coax (antenna) input. Run HDMI from the Pi into an HDMI-to-coax RF modulator, then run coax from the modulator into the TV, and tune the TV to channel 3 or 4. Your Pi is now a broadcast channel and the TV is receiving it over the air the way God and 1982 intended.

If the TV crops the edges of the picture, bump up the overscan margin in the control room until nothing important gets cut off. There are no fake scanline filters in CABLE 82, on purpose. The CRT is the filter.

Step 6: Give it a soundtrack

Drop a few audio files into the music/ folder and CABLE 82 plays them as a continuous background bed behind the pages, looping the set, shuffling if you like. Two tracks ship with it to get you started. Aim for the sound the old channels actually used: beautiful music, easy listening, and eventually the famous smooth jazz.

A channel of your own

A Pi, an old TV, a coax cable, and a folder of files, and now there is a corner of your house that runs its own quiet little channel: your messages, your weather, your headlines, your dad jokes, scrolling by all day.

It’s not useful, exactly. It’s better than useful.

CABLE 82 is open source and lives at github.com/nothans/cable-82.

Project Demo Video

Watch 6 minutes of glorious community news like it is 1982. Enjoy.

Update July 27, 2026: CheerLights Support

I can’t believe that it took me a few days to do this… CheerLights. A perfect feed (for me) is to see the latest CheerLights color scroll by every once in a while. Okay, so now you can add CheerLights feed support with a custom message if needed.

Update August 22, 2026: Updated GitHub README and better CRT support

Based on some user feedback, I built a version of the project on an older Raspberry Pi and used a much older CRT TV. This helped me find some areas for improvement.

I updated the kiosk command to use chromium (not chromium-browser), and it goes in ~/.config/labwc/autostart.

Old TVs do not have as much contrast as newer ones, so I added a CRT mode to help. This is in the “control room” or in the config.

And, a user reported “throttling” of the CPU. This happens when the Raspberry Pi is underpowered. This usually happens when you use a phone USB charger instead of a Raspberry Pi power supply.

From what I learned during the first month of the project, I added a troubleshooting section to the GitHub README for the CABLE 82 project.

I will publish an end-to-end tutorial for a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ soon to help smooth out the installation steps.

Thanks for sharing your feedback and trying the project. It helps all of us.

MCP attempts to standardize how LLM tools like Claude Desktop and Windsurf connect with external data sources and tools. So, naturally, I thought, “Put a bird on it.” Er, I mean, “Let’s CheerLight it.” By building a CheerLights interface, I learned everything from how to build Python libraries to Chrome extensions to Adrino integrations.

This looks like a big deal. I recommend that you learn how to build your own MCP server and/or use one of the hundreds that have already been created: https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers

I am using Windsurf on Windows for this tutorial.

From Windsurf, open the Terminal (View -> Terminal). Create a new folder called, “cheerlights-mcp” and enter it. Create a new file called, “server.py” and copy in the CheerLights MCP server code from GitHub.

From the terminal:

• PS C:\github> cd .\cheerlights-mcp\
• PS C:\github\cheerlights-mcp> python -m venv .venv
• PS C:\github\cheerlights-mcp> .venv\Scripts\activate
• PS C:\github\cheerlights-mcp> pip install mcp httpx

Add the CheerLights MCP to the Windsurf config file (adjust the path as needed).

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "cheerlights": {
            "command": "python",
            "args": ["C:\\github\\cheerlights-mcp\\server.py"]
        }
    }
}

Restart Windsurf.

From the terminal, start the Python server for the MCP: PS C:\github\cheerlights-mcp> python server.py

This should enable the CheerLights MCP and show two tools in the Cascade Chat area.

To use CheerLights MCP, you can ask Cascade, “What’s the current CheerLights color?” This will eventually get sent to the CheerLights MCP and the get_current_color() tool. If it all works, you will find out the latest color is magenta (or whatever the latest color happens to be)!

All of the source code is available on GitHub. Let me know if you give this a try and if you build your own. Have fun!

Arduino Library Installation

1. Open the Arduino IDE.
2. Select Tools > Manage Libraries.
3. Search for “CheerLights” and click “install”.

CheerLights Arduino Methods

• begin(const char* ssid, const char* password): Initialize the library with your WiFi credentials to let the library handle the WiFi connection.
• begin(): Initialize the library without WiFi credentials (use this to manually connect to the WiFi network and manage the WiFi connection outside the library).
• reconnect(): Reconnect to the WiFi network.
• isConnected(): Returns a boolean indicating whether the library is connected to the WiFi network.
• getCurrentColor(): Get the current CheerLights color from ThingSpeak channel 1417. Returns a pointer to a constant char array.
• currentColorName(): The current CheerLights color name (e.g., “red”). Returns a pointer to a constant char array.
• currentColorHex(): The current CheerLights color as a hex value (e.g., 0xFF0000). Returns a uint32_t.
• currentRed(), currentGreen(), currentBlue(): The RGB values for the current CheerLights color (e.g., 255, 0, 0). Returns a uint8_t.
• currentHue(), currentSaturation(), currentValue(): The HSV values for the current CheerLights color (e.g. 0, 255, 255). Returns a uint16_t for hue and uint8_t for saturation and value.
• hasColorChanged(): Returns a boolean indicating whether the current CheerLights color has changed since the last call to this method.

CheerLights Projects

Now, that you know about the Arduino library for CheerLights, you might be thinking about what you can do with it. CheerLights is a global network of synchronized lights. The lights are all set to the same color. Anyone can change the color by changing it on the CheerLights Discord Server and other social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky.

Get inspired by taking a look at the build gallery at the CheerLights website.

WLED Installation on Windows

• Download ‘esptool.exe’ app from the esptool releases area.
• Download the latest release of WLED for the device that you are using.
• Plug in the device and note the COM port.
• Open the Command Prompt and enter this command:

esptool.exe -p COMXXXXX write_flash 0x010000 WLED_0.14.4_ESP32-C3.bin

Note: Change COMXXXXX to the actual COM port that your device is connected to. If your ESP device is on COM 9, then this would be COM9.

Here’s what it looks like when everything works successfully on Windows:

WLED Configuration

This device’s button is on GPIO 9, and the data pin for LED lights is on GPIO 10. I need to set these in the WLED configuration for the lights to work.

• From WLED, select Config -> LED Preferences.
• Under LED outputs, enter ’10’ into the GPIO box.

• Scroll down the GPIO button sections.
• Select 9 for Button 0 and set to pushbutton.

• Scroll to the bottom and select Save.

CheerLights Settings (optional)

If (and when) you want to connect this WLED controller to CheerLights, just add the CheerLights MQTT server address to the Sync Interfaces. For MQTT to work, you will need to cycle the power going to the board (i.e., unplug and plug back in).

Configure the Arduino IDE to Support the Arduino UNO RF WiFi Board

To use the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board, you need to update and install some board drivers.

• Open the Arduino IDE (from Arduino) and update to v2.3.3 or newer.
• Go to the Boards Manager, search “Arduino UNO R4” and click INSTALL.

Controlling the LED Matrix

I am here for the LEDs.

Here’s how to use the onboard LED matrix, which requires the LED_Matrix library. Start your sketches with “#include “Arduino_LED_Matrix.h”, create an instance, and begin it in the setup section of your code.

Here’s an animation example:

#include "Arduino_LED_Matrix.h"   
#include "animation.h"            

ArduinoLEDMatrix matrix;  

void setup() {
  matrix.loadSequence(animation);
  matrix.begin();
  matrix.play(true);
}

void loop() {
}

I learned everything that I know about this from the Arduino documentation: https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/uno-r4-wifi/led-matrix/

The cool part is that the library includes predefined frames. You can load these, and the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi displays them without knowing how to code the frames.

#include "Arduino_LED_Matrix.h"

ArduinoLEDMatrix matrix;          

void setup() {
  matrix.begin();                 
}

void loop() {
  matrix.loadFrame(LEDMATRIX_HEART_BIG);
}

Here are the available frames in the LED_Matrix library:

• LEDMATRIX_BLUETOOTH
• LEDMATRIX_BOOTLOADER_ON
• LEDMATRIX_CHIP
• LEDMATRIX_CLOUD_WIFI
• LEDMATRIX_DANGER
• LEDMATRIX_EMOJI_BASIC
• LEDMATRIX_EMOJI_HAPPY
• LEDMATRIX_EMOJI_SAD
• LEDMATRIX_HEART_BIG
• LEDMATRIX_HEART_SMALL
• LEDMATRIX_LIKE
• LEDMATRIX_MUSIC_NOTE
• LEDMATRIX_RESISTOR
• LEDMATRIX_UNO

Going Further

George and I explored this new board together. We had a lot of fun trying out the examples from the Arduino documentation and experimenting on our own. You know that I will be hooking this up to CheerLights soon, but we noticed that the LEDs are only red. We will have to get creative. Then, George had an idea… He said, “Let’s make a CheerLights for emoji. Like, red could be a smiley face.” Great idea. I might just do that.

We are experiencing the capabilities and limitations of AI collectively. After OpenAI’s Dev Day, I have been thinking of ways to learn the new features, services, and APIs that were dropped. This time of year always brings about a lot of inspiring CheerLights projects and new people joining CheerLights. This also comes with a lot of questions, as the new folks are learning IoT, looking for sample code, or just looking for inspiration on what to build. This gave me an idea and a challenge. Could I build an AI chatbot that can help onboard new people onto the CheerLights project and help them learn IoT?

If you have ChatGPT Plus, you can try the CheerLights IoT Expert bot right now.

What is CheerLights?

CheerLights is an Internet of Things (IoT) project that creates a global network of lights that change color in unison. The concept is straightforward yet powerful: any connected light anywhere in the world will change to the same color when a new color is set. This allows people across different locations to feel connected through a shared lighting experience.

Features of the CheerLights IoT Expert GPT

The CheerLights IoT Expert GPT has a lot of general knowledge of Arduino, ESP Wi-Fi devices, ThingSpeak, and CheerLights. You can ask anything from the basics to advanced things like code generation for a specific device configuration.

• Natural language interface
• Onboarding prompts to get started
• Technical support and debugging
• Idea generation
• Code generation
• The world’s most sophisticated CheerLights color checker

How it works

A Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) is an advanced type of artificial intelligence model designed to understand and generate human-like text. This is the technology that ChatGPT is built on. It’s built using a neural network architecture called a transformer, which excels at processing sequential data like language. GPT models are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to learn language patterns, grammar, and context. They function by predicting the next word in a sequence, considering the words that have already been presented. This capability allows them to generate coherent and contextually relevant text responses. The more they are trained with diverse datasets, the better they become at mimicking human-like writing, answering questions, and even engaging in conversations, making them powerful tools in natural language processing.

OpenAI released a new feature where you can take the power of a foundational language model and direct it towards a specific domain. I created a GPT using all of the CheerLights documentation and blog posts that I have written over the past 12 years. I gave it additional instructions about where to find the latest CheerLights color and the fact that we no longer use Twitter/X. GPT-4 still thinks that you can set the color of everyone’s lights using Twitter (insert sad face emoji), but we are now on a Discord Server!

How to use the CheerLights IoT Expert Chatbot

If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, all you have to do is load up the GPT by clicking this URL: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-E2zjJXE56-cheerlights-iot-expert

From there, just click on an onboarding prompt or type in a message.

Use Cases

Try one of these prompts to help inspire how to use the CheerLights IoT Expert chatbot.

• How do I tell which pin is the power pin on a WS2812B LED strip?
• I want a sparkle animation for a NeoPixel strip of 16 LEDs.
• How do I teach IoT to a group of kids using CheerLights?
• How do I show the latest color of CheerLights in my Chrome browser?
• Write Python code that retrieves the last 100 color changes and analyzes the data for any patterns.
• What are five ideas for a CheerLights display?

Get Started

Give the CheerLights IoT Expert bot a try. It can get things wrong, but it can also surprise you with something that you never thought of before. If it answers something incorrectly, let me know. I can always make changes and provide up-to-date information to make sure the bot gives the best answer possible. I am looking forward to seeing the creative CheerLights displays this season enhanced by ChatGPT. Join the CheerLights Discord server and share all of your awesome projects, ideas, and experiences.

Bonus Prompt

I enabled image creation with DALL-E 3, just for fun. You can ask the CheerLights IoT Expert GPT to create images inspired by the latest CheerLights color. Try this prompt: Create an illustration based on the latest CheerLights color, depicting a globe with electric lights.

Twitter/X

According to my own History of the CheerLights Project, I created this project around the idea that anyone on Twitter, ahem, X, could change everyone’s lights. Twitter made the most sense. It was open and had a global reach. And the bonus was that followers of people who joined the project would see the tweets, which caused some of them to join the project. It was a nice, virtuous circle that fueled the growth of CheerLights year over year. 2022 was the biggest year for the project, just hitting its peak at the same time Twitter started to crack. The API access that we have had for over 12 years was cut off, users moved to decentralized platforms, and X’s relevance has been in constant question. Don’t get me wrong. I will always have a special place in my heart for Twitter. I can’t unwind Twitter’s on my professional growth over the last 15 years.

Discord

The CheerLights community got together last year and created a Discord server bot and even released the bot’s source code on GitHub. We did this to increase the number of ways to control the CheerLights network, but as it turned out, this is now the primary way to control CheerLights. Hundreds of our users moved over to the Discord server from Twitter/X. In some ways, Discord is way better. I love being able to chat in real-time with other people who are building CheerLights. A lot of people use Discord. And Discord is constantly evolving and keeping up with the trends by adding admin and community features. In other ways, it is not ideal for CheerLights. Discord servers are not easily discoverable. You have to be in the know. It is hard to attract new users since new users don’t see public mentions of the project. But I am not aiming for perfection. I am aiming for a path forward to keep the project growing. Discord is where we are now. Join us.

How can you help?

Since our Discord server is hidden from public view, we could use your help by making CheerLights discoverable. If you share your project on your blog or social channels, include a link to the Discord server invitation. H

CheerLights Discord Server Invitation Link: https://cheerlights.com/discord

Thank you to everyone who has helped build and grow this project over the last 12 years. This is always my favorite time of year getting to see the creative ways CheerLights gets used and how it enables learning of core IoT concepts.

CheerLights is a fun way to get started with IoT, microcontrollers, and LED lights. If you know how to make CheerLights work, you can build some other awesome IoT projects. CheerLights is a great project to get people interested in IoT. It’s often used as an “Hello, World” project for the Internet of Things, and what you learn can be applied to other project ideas.

To make a Halloween-inspired project, you can take the CheerLights color and illuminate a pumpkin or even a… skull from Pimoroni.

Check out other Halloween CheerLights projects over at the CheerLights blog. Have fun with the idea, build something spooky, and help spread the… fear.