Tag Archives: christmas

On the first day of Taobao Christmas

Taobao, the Chinese shopping site that combines eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba, recently got a lot easier for foreigners to use. As Sjaak documented in his Taobao buying adventures a few years ago, most foreigners use an agency that takes payment via Paypal, purchases your babies, and forwards them to you via DHL or airmail. Even […]

How to make a CheerLights controller with Arduino and ioBridge

CheerLights is an ioBridge Labs project that allows people’s lights all across the world to synchronize, stay linked based on social networking trends. It’s a way to connect physical things with social networking experiences and spread cheer at the same time. We are all connected. The Arduino is used to generate the PWN signal to […]

Christmas music on the Picaxe

If you need a quick source of canned Christmas music in a project, don’t forget the Picaxe line of microcontrollers from Revolution Education. All Picaxe “M” chips have three Christmas tunes preprogrammed and playable using the PLAY command: Jingle Bells, Silent Night, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer!

Twistmas Tree

Marisa tipped us to another interactive Christmas tree that uses Twitter. Alpay Kasal’s Twistmas Tree uses Processing to scrape Twitter search results for keywords. Ornaments with holiday keywords blink when new search results are found. A netbook running Processing with Twitter4J is used for performing searches of predetermined holiday words and generates a queue of […]

Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament

We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. This week we’re giving away free PCBs for the Hackable Christmas ornament. We made these […]