So, how does this work, anyway? Magic. Pure magic. And cats.

If that's good enough, you can go back. Or read on!

Just remember that you asked for it! The color changing device has an Arduino and NeoPixels inside, and the program goes out and gets the latest color from our site. If the color hasn't changed since it last checked, then it goes out to the CheerLights MQTT feed and grabs that color. If that hasn't changed, then lather, rinse, repeat until something does change. Whatever you see on the camera (if we have one connected) is the latest color from either our feed or CheerLights. Just in case there's no working camera or there's an issue with refreshing the picture, the current colors will still display below the picture box whenever the page is reloads automatically, which is generally within a minute.

The list of colors you see in the picker starts with the most common colors, then goes on to the spectrum of web-safe colors that have been tested to play well with Neopixles. On your browser you may see an "other" link, which brings up a different color picker. Not all browsers support this, and we can't guarantee the results if you go there. If the lights don't seem to be stable, then send it something like a solid blue (from the top row) and it should eventually reset.

If you see a B&W image, it's the camera telling you there's not enough light. Seven seriously bright Neopixels aren't enough sometimes, apparently.

What is this CheerLights thing, anyway? It's a world-wide network of lights that are controlled via various means on the Internet. Anyone on Mastodon to @cheerlights on Mastodon or share a color to the bot on their Discord Server (see the link in the previous sentence), and connectred lights all over the world will change. Why do we have our own separate control? Because we can! And because we can troubleshoot our software without constantly posting to their feed. And let's just say the cats aren't amused if we toot too much.;-) If you don't use Mastodon, you can come here and change the color of whatever device we happen to have on the camera. Why yes, CheerLights used to be on Twitter until the bots all went pay. This is an open source project supported by hobbyists around the world.

If you want to give this a go, check out our Hackaday project for a CheerLights Christmas Tree. There's a link to the code on GitHub from there.

Have fun!