Sherry the tree

Inspiration

We had LEDs, it's Christmas.

What it does

It visualises votes on a poll, by colour, across a load of LEDs wrapped around a tree.

How we built it

Server is built with Node.JS, which exposes a REST API using Express and also sends real-time data to the clients via Socket.IO. The server talks to an MQTT server, which a little ESP8266 microcontroller (running some C++ witchcraft) receives, and sends the data out to the LEDs.

Challenges we ran into

• Scaling a number of voters between 1-infinity between 50 LEDs, until we found a nice shiny library to do everything for us
• Getting the ESP to not crash ## Accomplishments that we're proud of It works, and seems to perform well ## What we learned
• Developed skills with talking to MQTT
• We played with AWS
• That sleep is required to write good code ## What's next for Sherry the tree Get a bigger tree and more LEDs, stick it in the middle of a roundabout during the next election.

Built With

• arduino-libs
• c++
• css
• esp8266
• express.js
• handlebars.js
• html
• javascript
• mqtt
• node.js
• socket.io
• ws2812b