It’s holiday time again, and my wife has me doing Christmas lights for the house next weekend after Thanksgiving. It may be too late for this year, but I’m wondering if something like this is possible using particle hardware, or if I need to follow this guys instructions and use arduino, or if there is a way to accomplish this with particle in a better way than what this is showing.
You sure can do it with particle hardware.
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Perfect, just wanted to make sure there were no hardware limitations before jumping in. I’ve only seen 8 bit music played with light animations so far.
Do remember that the logic level on Particle is 3.3V and not 5V as on Arduino Uno shown. Your wiring to the output shift registers needs to checked - should be OK as is but that number of relays would likely need a beefy power supply and not the VIN pin. Powering LED lights I would be tempted to use Solid State Relays given the speed you are switching the lights on and off (I assume AC power) you may get sticky relays. Clearly the cheap 8 way relay boards are going to be a lot cheaper. I would control them with a GPIO expander like a MCP23008 (8 ports) or MCP23017 (16 ports) and I2C.
You must have great neighbours if they are looking forward to a disco sound and light show every night between now and Christmas!
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I’ve made sure to cover my bases as far as the voltage levels go, I was researching that before even posting here. My neighbors will live, we’re not a social bunch, I’ve been here 7 years and I know two of them haha. It won’t be playing into the night, I’ll have the option built in to just have lights on without music though.