We started CheerLights in December 2011! 10 years of people joining the project and synchronizing their lights with others.
I introduced the CheerLights project to HackPGH, a makerspace in Pittsburgh, PA. The first set of lights were a modded GE Color Effects lights, an Arduino, and an ioBridge Web Gateway.
I was lucky to recruit a couple of people to build their own light displays and they linked their lights to mine. I started getting the word out more and more people joined the project and the big moment was when Matt Richardson wrote an article on the MAKE Magazine website. CheerLights really took off after Matt’s story!
The idea behind CheerLights is that you take a light that can change color and keep all of the lights synchronized with each no matter where they are located. So, if my light turns red, the rest of the interconnected lights also turn red. The mechanism to control the lights around the world is Twitter. A tweet to @CheerLights along with mentioning a color will set the color of the lights. This opens up the control to virtually anyone one around the world.
Some Inspiration
How Can You Help?
We are always looking for new people to join CheerLights. You don’t have to be a hardware expert to take part. Your ideas and your energy to get the word out are also very helpful.
- Join the CheerLights Discord Server and share your projects and ideas and learn from others
- Contribute examples to GitHub
- Subscribe to the CheerLights blog for news, projects, and inspiration
- Follow CheerLights on Twitter
- Tweet @CheerLights with a color name to keep the lights changing
Thanks to the Community
I would like to offer a special thanks to Andy Leer from that HackPGH night, Matt Richardson for jumpstarting this project and to Andy Stanford-Clark for your continued support and promotion of the project! And, a big thanks to the community. I love seeing people learn IoT, hardware, Arduino, and programming with the CheerLights project. I also love to see the creative way people join CheerLights.
We are all connected.