Just tweet “#Cheerlights” and a colour of the rainbow* and not only will my camper van change colour, but a lot of decorations around the world will too. (Note: it changes in real life – I don’t have a webcam on it)

*to be more specific any of these:

  • red (#FF0000)
  • green (#008000)
  • blue (#0000FF)
  • cyan (#00FFFF)
  • white (#FFFFFF)
  • oldlace / warmwhite (#FDF5E6)
  • purple (#800080)
  • magenta (#FF00FF)
  • yellow (#FFFF00)
  • orange (#FFA500)
  • pink (#FFC0CB)

“Cheerlights is  an “Internet of Things” project created by Hans Scharler that allows people’s lights all across the world to synchronize to one color set by Twitter. This is a way to connect physical things with social networking experiences.”

Wherever you are, you can access the Cheerlights feed and make your things change colour. This project uses cheerlights, MQTT, ESP8266 and Neopixels.

I had already hacked my camper van lamp. I used a Wemos D1 (ESP8266) and a strip of 8 neopixels.

However, I wanted to access Cheerlights via an MQTT feed.

The code I wrote to control the Wemos and access @AndySC’s MQTT cheerlights feed (www.iot.eclipse.org.) is available here.

The set-up of Wemos and neopixels accessing an MQTT feed is going to be ideal for Christmas decorations.

Cheerlights on all the Things!