Comments on: Noel’s Epic Christmas Hack

By: Virus Protection

Virus Protection — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:04:50 +0000

That's pretty cool Noel.. Good luck!

By: erandomtwo

erandomtwo — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:04:50 +0000

That's pretty cool Noel.. Good luck!

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:55:29 +0000

I'm surprised you didn't do something like this. Maybe you and Noel can cook up something even better for next year.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:54:03 +0000

Yeah, we have a big Arduino community here. I haven't dabbled much with open source hardware, but I've seen how cool it can be.

Don't worry about commenters. They're never happy.

By: noelportugal

noelportugal — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:34:19 +0000

Yes. It's been on my calendar for a few days now! Now lets just keep it hush hush Its going to be interesting the load they will get on their site the 7th!

By: topperge

topperge — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:26:38 +0000

I'm sure you guys have already seen, but Sparkfun if giving $100 in free stuff on January 7. That gives you 350 days until next Christmas for v2.0.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305

By: noelportugal

noelportugal — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:06:49 +0000

Thanks Jake for the shout out!! A lot of the tech blogs (engadget & hackaday) comments seemed to loose track of what I really tried to achieve: an internet enabled Christmas lights and music display! I am of course aware of the amazing light shows out there, but most of them rely on a PC and run with predefined scripts. As you mention is working well!! I'm still working out the Video and I have the Audio semi-working...

The novelty here is that in the past doing things like this will take a lot more effort. Now with what is called "Open Source Hardware" is far more easy. There are plenty of [free] libraries that you can use to control your micro controller. Check this article by the WSJ about the Arduino http://bit.ly/7SFZCv ... I just barely got into it (right before Halloween) and I have learned a lot since there are lot of resources out there.

Thanks for the post and Merry Christmas!!!