As a festive entry on eightbar this year, let’s talk about Christmas lights. Twitter-controlled ones! :-)

Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a set of lights to Twitter. As reported in Computer Weekly:

Using some clever IBM middeware, The microcontroller sets the illumination colour based on a signal from the internet or via SMS over a GSM network – so you can tweet “ibmlights” with the word RED, GREEN or BLUE to change their colour.

In fact, the commands got a bit more sophisticated than that, with more colours and lighting patterns. Towards the middle of last week the lights ended up over Laura‘s desk, and a growing band of folks delightedly tweeted the @ibmlights account with instructions to change colour or pattern. She took some pictures for me (and some video as well, but I didn’t have time to edit it…).

Another year of innovation and fun at Hursley! :-) Happy Christmas!

(by the way, well worth taking a look at the rest of the Computer Weekly article I linked above – lots more coolness from Hursley! oh, and I’m not sure how long the lights will be online… it’s just a bit of fun really)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 by Andy Piper at 16:00 and is filed under Hursley, Technology, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can also bookmark this page on del.icio.us or digg.