Stranger Issues Christmas lights are the proper Halloween ornament

Within the first season of Stranger Issues, a personality makes use of a string of Christmas lights to speak with a lacking beloved one. The lacking particular person in query can flash explicit lights subsequent to letters painted on a bedsheet to spell out messages. The Christmas lights and bedsheets have develop into part of popular culture and since the present is creepy, Redditor BishSaidWut’s recreation is the proper Halloween ornament.

Not like a lot of the comparable decorations you can purchase on-line that both blink randomly or spell out pre-programmed messages, BishSaidWut’s Christmas lights can spell out any message that they textual content to a particular cellphone quantity. That cellphone quantity connects to the Twilio service, which parses SMS messages and makes the textual content out there by way of an API. An ESP8266 board connects to that API and processes incoming messages. If the message is inside an appropriate size and doesn’t include profanity, the ESP8266 passes on the textual content to an Arduino Uno board. 

The Arduino controls the precise Christmas lights. It buffers textual content strings that it receives from the ESP8266 and begins animating a brand new message as quickly because the final one finishes. The Christmas lights are all individually addressable RGB LEDs, so the Arduino merely illuminates the LED subsequent to every letter within the correct sequence. BishSaidWut set this up for SMS management in order that they may show new messages at any time when they like and so they’re even contemplating posting the cellphone quantity so others can ship their very own messages whereas BishSaidWut streams the outcomes.