Sony Pictures Television noticed my tweet and reached out. They offered to send me a gift box to thank me for my loyalty over the years. Well, they blew me away today with an HHM banker box filled with surprises.

SPTV really delighted me with all of the touches. The box had redacted files, coffee-stained paper, crumpled up legal pad paper, and Hamlin Hamlin & McGill branding. The gifts were quite unexpected: World’s 2nd Best Lawyer… Again coffee mug complete with bullet hole, a working burner phone with a voicemail from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, a Zafiro Añejo bottle stopper, and the LWYRUP license plate from Saul’s Cadillac. The whole package made me well up with tears and I got a little overwhelmed. What a complete surprise.

I really love the Breaking Bad Universe universe as it has given me a lot of joy appreciating the stories, pouring over the meaning and symbolism, listening to the cast and crew on the insider podcast, and going into deep discussions with friends over the years.

Thank you, Sony Pictures Television!

Do you listen to music while you work? I write code, blog posts, and PowerPoint presentations, and I have to have some background music. I either prefer “lo-fi” or alternative rock from the 1990s. I have been listening to the Lofi Girl channel for years and it has helped me through many sticky design problems, aided me as I learned new technologies, and was my backdrop to new inventions.

One neat thing that the Lofi Girl YouTube channel does is have live streams of Lo-Fi music with 2D animated art. They change up the scene, vibe, colors, mood, art style, and motion. I always found the streams relaxing, peaceful, and engaging with Just small simple movements and changes over a long period of time. This recognition is what started me experimenting with Lo-Fi music and 2D animation in Adobe After Effects.

What is Lo-Fi Music?

Lo-fi (also typeset as lofi or low-fi; short for low fidelity) is a music or production quality in which elements usually regarded as imperfections of a recording or performance are audible, sometimes as a deliberate aesthetic choice.

Wikipedia

The way I look at Lo-Fi is that the songs are without lyrics and vocal tracks. Lo-fi music is repetitious background music usually influenced by hip hop sounds and beats along with scratching, environmental, or natural noise.

In the r/LofiHipHop subreddit, someone posted about making A Lo-fi Hip-Hop Music Generator using LSTM and recurrent neural networks. Yes, we now live in an age where this kind of innovation with AI technologies is not only possible but useable. And, of course, the code is just sitting on GitHub for anyone to use, make changes, and make improvements.

Here’s some AI generated Lo-Fi music for you to sample.

Twitch Live Stream

With some help, I was able to create an animated 2D scene using Adobe After Effects. It is a scene looped over and over but the loop is seamless. The changes a little bit: screen shows scrolling chat messages, it’s raining outside, the cat is sleeping, and the humidifier is humidifying. The CheerLights part of the logo and the body of the humidifier are transparent. This means that I can change their colors by changing the background color. MOV files support transparency. You probably already see where I am going, but I set the background color with CheerLights which changes the logo and the humidifier. This is a proof of concept and it works. I pull all of the elements together in OBS Studio to produce a composite stream: CheerLights color background, 2D animated MOV file, and the Lo-Fi music playing with the VLC plugin.

You can change my live stream right now by tweeting to @cheerlights and naming a color.

Some Ideas

So, what I basically have is a social network controlled live stream. I could make more of the show interactive. If I had more elements that were controllable, OBS could show elements or not. A tweet could influence the next song that is playing or even change the song using the procedurally generated music. I will keep exploring this space. Let me know if you have any ideas or want to contribute. Cheers.

CheerLights is an Internet of Things project where lights are synchronized to the same color. The color is controlled by anyone using Twitter. Just send a tweet to @CheerLights and mention a color name and this will set the colors of all of the lights connected to CheerLights. Learn more at CheerLights.com.

New Backend System

CheerLights is now running a Node-RED flow process matching tweets. This system takes the text from the tweets and looks for color names. If any match the supported colors, the flow sends the color to ThingSpeak, Adafruit IO, and CheerLights MQTT using MQTT.

JavaScript Library and Web Widgets

To make it easy for web developers to join the CheerLights project, we released a JavaScript Client Library for CheerLights on GitHub. We also made some web widgets that you can use to show the latest CheerLights color on a web page.

CheerLights Live Stream on Twitch

I am streaming a CheerLights display on Twitch. You can use the live stream to see if your CheerLights display is staying in sync with your display. I am streaming some lo-fi music along with some animations. I will change it up after the holidays.

CheerLights Community on Discord

The CheerLights team has set up a Discord Server to talk about our plans and share news of the project. You are welcome to join, ask questions, and share your projects. People of all skills are welcome!

Together we can build the world’s largest network of synchronized lights.

I also added some camera feeds to the CheerLights Live page. So, if you don’t have a display, you can just see the latest color in your browser.

To control CheerLights, send a tweet to @cheerlights or include “cheerlights” somewhere in your message with the name of a color.

@CheerLights George’s favorite color is cyan

Tweet from Hans Scharler

It’s easy to join the project, check out the CheerLights API for technical details and the CheerLights Blog for inspiration.

The idea behind CheerLights is that you take a light that can change color and keep all of the lights synchronized with each no matter where they are located. So, if my light turns red, the rest of the interconnected lights also turn red. The mechanism to control the lights around the world is Twitter. A tweet to @CheerLights along with mentioning a color will set the color of the lights. This opens up the control to virtually anyone one around the world.

Some Inspiration

How Can You Help?

We are always looking for new people to join CheerLights. You don’t have to be a hardware expert to take part. Your ideas and your energy to get the word out are also very helpful.

• Join the CheerLights Discord Server and share your projects and ideas and learn from others
• Contribute examples to GitHub
• Subscribe to the CheerLights blog for news and projects
• Follow CheerLights on Twitter
• Tweet @CheerLights with a color name to keep the lights changing

Thanks to the Community

I would like to offer a special thanks to Andy Leer from that HackPGH night, Matt Richardson for jumpstarting this project and to Andy Stanford-Clark for your continued support and promotion of the project! And, a big thanks to the community. I love seeing people learn IoT, hardware, Arduino, and programming with the CheerLights project. I also love to see the creative way people join CheerLights. Thank you!

The Internet of Nouns

I grew up knowing the definition of the word noun. In English, a noun is a word (but not a pronoun) that is used for a person, place, or thing. This is what the Internet of Things gets wrong. IoT is only significant if the network of things is also aware of people and places. Imagine your internet-connected speaker not knowing its location or who your contacts are. Asking for the weather or calling someone would be cumbersome. It’s (or rather IoT’s) utility comes from knowing about nouns. Let me introduce The Internet of Nouns.

ioBridge: Things

I spent a lot of time online back in the mid to late 2000s. With my company, I even traveled the United States helping design and support DSL internet roll-out. I was convinced that web applications were the future of software applications. I built web sites, server software, and prototypes of ideas. I loved following the tech trends and seeing companies try out new things that were chiefly web born. It wasn’t too long before I wanted to try my own ideas out at scale.

My high school friend and business partner, Jason Winters, and I kept up a long conversation about what the future was going to be like. We used to talk for hours almost everyday. Jason’s interests were hardware and mine were software, specifically web apps. Jason joked about how he wished he could wake me up earlier. In those days, I liked to sleep in. I don’t have that luxury now with a four-year-old. Jason gets his day going early. We lived a 1000 miles apart. He would say things like, “It would be funny to turn your lights on when I am ready to talk.”

In 2008, Jason Winters and I left our jobs to create ioBridge. We created hardware integrated with the web. The hardware needed the web, but this means the hardware could leverage the web. We had demos of simple hardware devices using the Google Calculator API. The hardware itself couldn’t even do floating point math, but now had effectively unlimited computational power by being on the web.

Twitter: People

Twitter was the first social network that got my attention… although I had profiles at Friendster and MySpace. I loved the idea of Twitter from the beginning. Obviously Twitter is now a thing that we all know, but back in 2007, Twitter was still trying to figure out what it was. Most people used it for short status updates, like “Hans is eating at Qiznos”, and all of your other followers could react and post their equally uninteresting updates. I couldn’t stop obsessing about it. I joked with Jason… What if my toaster and thermostat were on Twitter.

My friend Jay Huie also kept talking to me about APIs. He impressed upon me how important it was for applications to be able to link to others. In my opinion, this is one reason Twitter took off with developers. Twitter had an API that allowed people to make apps and integrations that were not thought of by Twitter. Twitter is a platform and their functionality and APIs enabled others to build on top. Some used Twitter for marketing. Others used Twitter for news. I used Twitter as place for updates authored by my things.

Foursquare: Location

Some location-based apps came online in the mid the 2000s. I think Foursquare was the company that invented the idea of a check-in. Foursquare leveraged the GPS module in your phone. The Foursquare app knew your raw latitude and longitude and turned that raw info into a place. It knew if you were home or at the bank, moving, or arriving at a restaurant. It knew if your friends were nearby and shared where they checked-in. Foursquare was fun and really interesting to me. They also had APIs.

ThingSpeak: Pulling It All Together

My contribution to the technology mindshare was pulling together parts of social networks, location-based services, and connected things. I built a platform called ThingSpeak. Of course, we had an API for others to build what they wanted to. I used it to build many things. It became my place to try out new combinations of things. Some of those things led to media attention, patents, and anecdotes at parties. I love seeing what others build. As of March 2020, there are over 1 million projects connected to ThingSpeak.

MyToaster: Social Networking for My Toaster

Back in 2008, I used to talk about my toaster being on Twitter. Mostly people asked me what Twitter was and others asked why. I didn’t exactly know at the time, but I thought it was interesting or at least funny to say. I do adore alliteration a lot. I used ioBridge and ThingSpeak to make a socially connected toaster. My toaster only updates its Twitter feed and thousands of followers of its binary state: Toasting or Done Toasting.

And thanks to a mention in Wired magazine, my work moved from fun stories at parties to boardrooms of the top manufacturers of consumer products. Together we have built connected lights, pools, speakers, tide gauges, weather stations, thermostats, air quality stations, garage doors, and you name it.

(I have written about the history of the Internet of Things and MyToaster before if you are interested in learning more about how my toaster kicked off a trend in connected appliances and home automation in the modern era.)

Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson introduced us to the idea that everything is a remix. You innovate by coping things, making changes, and combining things. Understanding the basic elements of creativity and following this simple process will produce some interesting results.

I couldn’t have innovated without everything that came before me. And, my work became an influence for others who came next. And, in reality, there are no actual defined steps: it’s all gradients. Creativity isn’t magic. We all pose the ability to be creative. Bob Dylan’s first album had 11 cover songs on it. He found his voice by copying and the tedious work of experimentation. I recommend Kirby’s Everything is a Remix documentary and TED Talk.

My life changed by combining a few concepts together from trends happening around me. MyToaster on Twitter became my career and a significant turning point in the Internet of Things. So, here’s a special thanks to Twitter and Foursquare. I am forever entangled in this web, but I also look forward to what’s next. I am excited to see what gets created with everything that exists today and with more people understanding the elements of creativity.

So ask yourself… What will you make? What can you only invent? What “dumb” thing can you do? You have your own experiences and interests. Your perspective will yield innovations that only you can produce. I am on the edge of my seat.

CheerLights Introduction

Here’s a quick introduction to the CheerLights project for those who are new to the project. Imagine 1000’s of multicolored lights all around the world synchronized to one color. When one of the lights turns red, they all turn red. To control CheerLights, send a tweet to @cheerlights or include “cheerlights” somewhere in your message with the name of a color. This will cause a chain reaction and all of the CheerLights displays and apps will change their color to red.

ThingSpeak MQTT Service

CheersLights is powered by ThingSpeak IoT. And, this year, I am happy to introduce real-time CheerLights updates using ThingSpeak’s new MQTT service. Using the MQTT service by ThingSpeak, your CheerLights change instantly. ThingSpeak has posted an example that gets a Particle Photon connected to CheerLights using MQTT. The Subscribe to Channel Updates Using Particle Photon Client example shows you how to use a Particle Photon Wi-Fi board to subscribe to channel updates from the CheerLights channel. The program displays the color read from the channel on the built-in LED on the Photon board. You can subscribe to the channel feed or directly to the color field on the CheerLights channel.

Once you learn how to use the MQTT service from ThingSpeak, you can easily adapt it to your IoT project. This is a great way to have real-time control of a device or real-time monitoring of sensors.

If you want to follow the project and see what others are building, visit CheerLights.com or follow on Twitter.

It has been a real treat watching this project evolve as more and more people add lights… and other things. Things like Android and iPhone apps that check the latest color of CheerLights, an old Commodore 64, and Christmas trees.

To control the lights around the world, send a Tweet mentioning @CheerLights and a color. The command is processed by ThingSpeak platform and distributed to all of the lights listening to the CheerLights API.

@CheerLights I am dreaming of a White Christmas

Another powerful aspect of the CheerLights project is that is shows off what is possible with the emerging Internet of Things. With a single message sent via a social network like Twitter, 1000’s of objects around the world are in sync with each other. Lights are connected by many types of controllers, such as Arduino, ioBridge, Philips, and the Raspberry Pi. This project is only possible through the Internet and the coordination of developers around the world.

Learn how to join the project at CheerLights.com.

We are all connected…

Something that has emerged over the years is social networking. I have been fascinated by the idea of collective intelligence. It’s fun to follow a football game on Twitter or on Facebook’s live stream. You get to see the take other’s have on the same event that you are experiencing. If the Steelers score, you can feel it reverberate through social networks. These networks only work if there is lots of participation by many people. I have heard that people have predicted STD outbreaks from Twitter status updates, food poisoning sources, and even where earthquakes have taken place. This is fascinating to me.

The results are two-fold: you can learn from this data and that we are all connected. Enter in, CheerLights – CheerLights is my combination of distributed devices with social networking. This project that involves connecting multicolored lights to other people’s lights and allow Twitter keywords control them all. If someone tweets, “@cheerlights let’s go green” – every light connected to the project would change to green. To me this is a physical representation of a social network trending topic. It’s a way to share a moment in that moment. Just like with social networking, CheerLights requires scale to be very interesting.  If you check out CheerLights.com, you will see how to build a set of lights that are linked together with other people’s lights via Twitter. I have examples using things from ioBridge, Arduino, and Digi. Please let me know if you decide to build something and connect it to CheerLights.

We are all connected. That’s my purpose for building all of this technology. Nothing else matters.