I finally had the time to document my project which I could not finish without your help. Just to name my problems with the TCPClient and the WS2801 strip. So I want to say thank you thank you thank you because without your help I couldn’t have done it.
So my idea was similar to the Bus Stop Light or the Should I bring an umbrella. Just that I wanted to have a led strip inside an IKEA floor lamp that would change its colors according to the current weather.
I wrote a .NET web service that queries the current condtions from http://openweathermap.org/ and would transform it to colors. IE green for no clouds, blue for temp below 5 degrees celsius etc.
The spark would query it every five minutes and update the led strip accordingly.
But I also added more functionality to the core so I can control the strip over the cloud. For example to set a single color for the whole string, control any of the 82 leds in the strip or have a rainbow animation.
The code can be found on github and more infos and fotos on my blog.