Musical Christmas Lights

Inspiration

The Christmas season in combination with the impending stress of finals week inspired us to choose a fun, seasonal project.

What it does

Three strands of Christmas lights blink in time with Christmas music.

How I built it

We cut up three strands of Christmas lights and hooked them up to the relays found in the grove kit. The relays are controlled by the arduino which is hooked up to a computer running the code in an IDE called beatWrite

Challenges I ran into

We found two similar projects on line and had to combine them and tailor the existing code to fit our needs. This was a challenge because working with someone else's unfamiliar code is always a bit trickier than coding it yourself from scratch. Also, understanding exactly how the code translates to real world output had us tricked for a little bit. We ran into a problem where the code turned on/off the lights too quickly for the lights to respond. Once we realized the problem, this was easily fixed by adding a brief delay.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud of learning how to strip and rewire the Christmas lights, learning to code in a C-based language, and most of all we are proud of taking our coding knowledge and expanding it to work on hardware applications.

What I learned

We learned how Christmas lights are wired, how relays work, how to code in C, and how to effectively work as partners

What's next for Musical Christmas Lights

Make it bigger and better. Perhaps we can convince one of our parents to let us rig up the entire house with Musical Christmas Lights. Also, the relays are quite loud so finding a quieter set up would let the concept of the project shine through more.

Built With

• beatwrite
• http://www.instructables.com/id/grove-relay-basic-using-intel-edison/step3/code/
• http://www.instructables.com/id/how-to-make-leds-flash-to-music-with-an-arduino/