So, first to go was the LED glass prism stand received as a christmas present - out went the potted pcb with three fading LEDs, and in went a single piece of RGB strip fixed in place with a hot glue gun.
wire comes out the bottom and goes to a nanode.
The cheerlights API defines 10 colors that can be set, but I want the possibility of sending any RGB value, so I created @FakeCheerlights as an MQTT series of topics on the test.mosquitto.org broker
fakecheerlights/rgb
fakecheerlights/colour
fakecheerlights/raw
which contain the hex RGB value, the identified colour name and the raw tweet.
A separate script (running on the NAS) uses the twitter API via tweepy to follow the twitter stream search for 'cheerlights' and 'fakecheerlights' mentioned in a tweet. If a colour name (matched from the X11 rgb.txt) is found then it publishes the corresponding hex value to the broker
Since fakecheerlights uses a publish/subscribe model, it's *much* faster to react than the original cheerlights protocol which relies on a client polling the server API. The downside is there's no nice fade time between colours.
The nanode (I have one of the earlier batches) was designed as a low-cost ethernet enabled arduino, so uses the Microchip ENC28J60 ethernet rather than the wiznet of the arduino shield. Thanks to UIPEthernet.h and PubSubClient.h it's just possible to code in a basic subscriber which sets the strip output to match.
Since I plan to use the pub/sub model at work for monitoring the machine status and batch queues, I gutted an old ikea childs lamp and replaced the LED with another WS2812B and hooked that up to a freetronics etherten with a PoE daughterboard attached. Sadly the hardware revision I had didn't include the MCP 24AA025E48 that my old nanode did, so my sketch had to include a hard-coded MAC address.
A short youtube video demonstrates the reaction time, and all the source code is on github. (with the exception of the nanode sketch as I didn't save it before closing the arduino ide)
