Cheerlights with the Raspberry Pi

I had seen a reference to Cheerlights on CymplyCy’s website and was intrigued. The whole idea of a set of lights being controlled by a twitter feed seemed a useful demonstration of bringing electronics, user interaction and social media together.

By tweeting #cheerlights, it’s possible to change the current Cheerlights colour. This is picked up by a variety of devices around the world and the idea is that all of the connected lights would display the same colour.

CympleCy has added to ScratchGPIO7 so that a “broadcast getcheerlights” command will trigger a fetch of the current colour.

My idea was to take the colour and use this to change the background colour of a Scratch screen to match the cheerlights around the world. I created a set of background colours that matches the cheerlights defined colours. It’s then a simple job to see what the current colour is and then choose a background to match. With the Scratch window set to full screen, it’s quite an effective colour source and a useful demonstration. Eventually the screen-blanking will kick in and I haven’t investigated disabling that yet.

With a few RGB LEDs it might be possible to create a physical light that matches the current colour. Equally, it would be lovely to see this controlling a set of NeoPixels (RGB LEDs) although this isn’t so straightforward with the Raspberry Pi.

 

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