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Design

Synchronize Your Christmas Lights With People All Over The World [How-To]

Using Twitter, of course.

If you embrace the holidays like the woman in Target’s overzealous (and hysterical) holiday commercials, then you’ll be tickled to hear about this initiative from ioBridge Labs that aims to link Christmas lights all over the globe through a CheerLights controller.

Once an Arduino is set up to follow #CheerLights, the color of your bulbs (along with everyone else’s in the network) will change every time someone Tweets at or mentions @CheerLights and a specific color.

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Some of the equipment and materials you’ll need to participate are GE G-35 Color Effects Lights, an Arduino base board, an ioBridge IO-204 monitor and control module, a female DC Power adapter, a 2.1mm DC Power Plug with cable and some hookup wire.

The process is all outlined in this video, but we’ll break down the main steps below…

· Bypass and interrupt the signal wire (center wire on the strand of lights) to customize bulb color by labeling and cutting the wires.

· Connect the signal wire and the ground wire to the DC power adapter and plug into the digital output pin of your Arduino microcontroller.

· In order to receive the prompts from Twitter, use the ioBridge IO-204 gateway to connect the Arduino to the internet.

· Connect the serial line to the serial receiver of the Arduino and all the hardware should be set up.

· Program and download the Arduino code and setup the ioBridge bridge widget.

· Demo and start Tweeting!

Visit CheerLights.com for further instruction, code and tips on where to buy materials.

[via MAKE]