Kevin Cuzner's Personal Blog
Electronics, Embedded Systems, and Software are my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The IoTree: An internet-connected tree
For this Christmas I decided to do something fun with my Christmas tree: Hook it up to the internet. Visit the IoTree here (available through the 1st week of January 2019):
The complete source can be found here:
http://github.com/kcuzner/iotree
The IoTree is an interface that allows anyone to control the pattern of lights shown on the small Christmas tree on my workbench. It consists of the following components:
- My Kinetis KL26 breakout board (http://github.com/kcuzner/kl2-dev). This controls a string of 50 WS2811 LEDs which are zip-tied to the tree.
- A Raspberry Pi (mid-2012 vintage) which parses pattern commands coming from the cloud into LED sequences which are downloaded to the KL26 over SPI. It also hosts a webcam and periodically throws the image back up to the cloud so that the masses can see the results of their labors.
- A cloud server which hosts a Redis instance and python application to facilitate the user interface and communication down to the Raspberry Pi.
I'm going to go into brief detail about each of these pieces and some of the challenges I had with getting everything to work.
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The IoTree: An internet-connected tree