Morse Code Christmas Lights

I did not want to spend much time trying to figure out how to connect a board to the light strip. Grove System is a modular, standardized connector prototyping system. Grove LED String Light comes with a driver board and 5M RGB LED string.

Step 1: Setup Hardware

Seeeduino Cortex-M0+ comes with 3 Grove connectors: one is market UART and two are I2C. Grove LED light string driver module only uses one pin to turn the light on or off. There is no Digital Grove interface so I decided to use one of the I2C connectors available.

Step 2: Software

Seeeduino Cortex-M0+ has Atmel SAMD21 MCU so I could use its internal RTC to check the time and turn lights only during specific hours of a day. If time is right we can encode text as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes (Morse Code) which we translate to lights on for a specific time.

Input:

"We wish you a merry Christmas"

will be translated to:

.--. /.--......... / -.-- ---..- /.- / --..-..-. -.-- / -.-......-...... - --.-...

where

dot = light ON for 1 second

dash = light ON for 3 seconds

gap = light OFF for 1 second