Letting the internet draw on my house for the holidays

Letting the internet draw on my house for the holidays

The story of how I let strangers on the internet draw on my house through my christmas lights.

The Idea

Like most municipalities, my town organizes a Christmas light map where residents can submit their homes for others to drive around and admire. I have long been a fan of those houses featured on YouTube that run shows set to music with impressive production quality. However, I felt they were always missing something crucial: the ability for people to interact with them.

Amid the pandemic, I wanted to create an opportunity for people separated by COVID-19 restrictions to share a holiday moment together. So I decided to put up some holiday lights and give full control to the people driving past my house (and eventually the internet).

How it works

Initially, I needed to install some Christmas lights. For this project, I used about ten strands of LED lights that were individually addressable, allowing me to control each light's color and intensity individually.

I utilized a Raspberry Pi and a 12V power supply in my basement to control and power the numerous strands of lights. I also wrote custom software enabling the implementation of various patterns and allowing others to control the lights remotely.

Next, I built a website that was publicly accessible and advertised in the town paper. It featured a 2D low-poly representation of my house created in Adobe Illustrator. Using an HTML canvas, users could select a color (similar to an artist at a canvas) and "paint" on the house using their finger. As they painted, the corresponding color would appear on my house's lights in real-time.

When no one had painted for about ten minutes, I programmed the system to rotate through various manually programmed patterns. This was a highly enjoyable exercise, as it allowed me to see while loops and conditionals in the code represented as patterns in real life.

The Reaction

Although this project didn't go as viral as some of my others, it did generate local buzz, and I received a lot of positive feedback from those who interacted with it. I did have a few people reach out and indicate that the lights allowed them to share a holiday moment with a loved one far away - and for me, that made the project a success.

Before concluding the project, I set up a live stream and allowed followers to interact with the lights. However, I believe that the level of awe experienced when interacting with the lights in person was not the same as watching something light up on a stream.