There’s always something so fascinating about code working in the real world, its like the developer’s answer to Lego. Great read Seb!

Hey! We loved your work, and decided to give it a try.
So, based on your project we made http://strangerxmas.pl
As you can see, we tweaked some of it, added this and that. Also, a tricky part was setting a livestream with no lag, all services like FB Live, YouTube Live, Twitch introduce a ca. 9 sec. lag, which made the live view pointless. So we had to set up a custom stream with ffmpeg.
Hope you like it!

Lovely article! Makes me want to experiment with making something with hardware. Thanks for taking the time to share!

Great read/project!

> node /home/pi/strangerthings/client.js < /dev/null &

> and routes its output to nowhere

That’s the wrong syntax/symbol – actually that’s taking /dev/null as input and sending it to the command on stdin.

Probably meant:

Love it. I totally forgot about your awesome laser skillz Seb. But I just revisited your lasershow in Oxford old city hall ❤ https://vimeo.com/89624072

@Andy – yes thank you! It was a typo, fixed now.

@Amy my pleasure! Let me know if you give it a try :)

@Limes Thanks! The server code is on my github so you can host it yourself. You can even host it on the actual Raspberry Pi if you’re feeling really crazy! Although then of course you will need to open a port on your home router if you want to access it outside of your local network.

Can you explain why you need the logic level shifter ?
You cannot use the pins that output 5V ?

Hi @neolao, the 5V pins just provide power, they’re not GPIO pins so you can’t turn them on or off. You may actually get away without using the level shifter as the lights might just about be able to read the data at 3.3V, but it’s a lot less reliable, especially if the cables get a bit longer. Hope this helps!

Thanks Luke!

Hi @Seb. Awesome project! One question. What is the reason that connection between my browser and Raspberry Pi must be handled by your WS server? It means that I can’t use it offline?

Hey Seb,

Thanks for this project, it was great fun setting it up.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the software side to work on my pi (its way too old), but using the hardware steps I managed to setup my own inspired by project:

Lights that react to Tweets about christmas :D
https://github.com/tomwilderspin/hashtag-lights

let me know what you think !