SparkFun Things

We've made a "Stranger Things"-inspired message wall for your viewing (and tweeting!) pleasure.

Lots of us here at SparkFun are fans of the Netflix original series "Stranger Things." It's a super creepy sci-fi/horror show, and there's one scene where a mother, played by Winona Ryder, attempts to contact her missing son using Christmas lights strung on the wall as a sort of ouija board.

To make it, I used our addressable LEDs, strung together with bits of cut-up USB cable. Then, for each LED, I took an old-school C7 Christmas light, cracked off the metal base and extracted the guts. I then pulled a socket off a strand of lights, hollowed it out and hot glued those two pieces together. Finally, I slipped the completed assembly over the LED.

The whole array is being driven by an Arduino Pro, receiving characters over a serial port so you can type in a message to appear on the wall.

But why stop there? I've hooked up a computer to the Arduino and have it searching twitter for the hashtag #sparkfunthings. ~~If you mark a tweet with that hashtag, it'll appear on the wall, and you can see it over the webcam feed below.~~ The livestream has ended for now, but it may be back! Here's a recording of our livestream...

If you're interested in making your own version, all of the code is up on the SparkFun GitHub page. Here's a list of all the bits and pieces (short of the Christmas lights, which can be easily found on Amazon) needed to implement your own version of it.