Today’s experiment is based on a project by Hans Scharler that is called Cheerlights. The idea is globally linked lights that can be simultaneously controlled via Twitter commands. It is a good example of the world growing closer and closer together with the Internet.

Die RGB-Led auf dem Steckboard an den Pins D3, D5 und D6
The circuit is similar to previous projects

Behind today’s door, you will find a fourth extension cable with which the RGB-LED can also be placed aside. This can be particularly practical if, for example, you want to hide the board in the Christmas tree while the RGB-LED decorates the top of the tree.

The program: Day23_CheerLights

For today’s program, you do not need to make any dedicated ThingSpeak changes. This project has a public channel that you can find under the link

https://thingspeak.com/channels/1417

Die öffentliche ThingSpeak Seite für das Cheerlights-Projekt
Preview of the Cheerlights project page

On that page, you will also always find the current colour and further information on the project.

The programme also needs the Crossfade-Library by Radek Wierzbicki (source: https://github.com/radekw/Arduino/tree/5f24ce7c8db9dfbb5252b59824c3217d851b3a3c). For practical reasons, a copy of the Library version used is enclosed in the sketch folder. It must be copied into the libraries folder of your sketchbook folder. The library permits quick and easy definition of colours and also ensures that the LEDs will slowly change to another colour (this is called fade).

If you upload the program now, the current colour of the LED is displayed after a few seconds. You can now write a Twitter message and thus change your and also the colour of all other Cheerlights users. The message must contain a #Cheerlights, @Cheerlights or just the keyword Cheerlights and also have one of the pre-defined colours behind the keyword. The pre-defined colours include:

red, green, blue, cyan, white, warm white, purple, magenta, yellow, orange, pink

A possible tweet is:

Testing my #cheerlights project on my #NanoESP with the colour blue #ThingSpeak #IoT

or a similar message. This way, you can recolour the world.