It’s December and you know what that means. Rampant consumerism, holiday feasts! Festivus ❤. Jolly old men leaving toys for those he has deemed worthy. And best of all blinkenlights. That’s right. The best parts of the season is Festivus and blinkenlights. Now since I haven’t a Festivus pole, this isn’t about Festivus. This is about blinkenlights. Well not so much actual blinkenlights, but the seasonal holiday lights that also happen to blink.
Now, I’m a weird one. That much is obvious. I also love the twinkle and dance of flashing lights. Why? Dunno, some primal remnant of watching fire? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way I wanted some and didn’t have any on hand. Now any reasonable person who wanted some blinking holiday lights and didn’t have any would just go to the store and buy some, not me. I had a string of warm white LEDs and a choice of several microcontroller development boards as well as a rPi model B and a Beaglebone black and was determined to put the two together.
So I did. I grabbed my msp430 development board, the string of LEDs, and my laptop and got to coding. Since I was an impatient bunny I didn’t bother with TI’s code studio. It’s a huge download, needs a login(last I used it, it needed a login), and is just clunky. Instead I used Energia, a prototyping platform based on the Wiring and Arduino frameworks. It’s “mostly” Arduino compatible and for just some simple blinking lights it’s all that is needed. I’m not going to go into a full tutorial on how to use Energia or Arduino there are several out there and if you used one, you can easily use the other. I will however share the rather crude and hastily written code.