Smart Curtain Image Display

The Christmas season has come and gone, and festive lights are (hopefully) down and stored for their next appearance. If you’d like to step up your game for 2023 with animated lights that can display sprites, animations, and anything else you can think of, then check out the Deluxe Smart Curtain project from vcch.

The setup is ingeniously simple, hanging strips of addressable LEDs where a traditional curtain would go on one’s window. Instead of blocking light, this “curtain” emits bright images in the form of twenty two-meter high LED strips. These are controlled with an M5Stack IoT development platform, which provides both a local interface, and the ability to log on wirelessly to modify the display.

In this installation, LED strips are chained together, and hung from an upper section of plastic. A second piece of plastic is affixed to the bottom of each strip, which acts as a weight, and helps avoid a mess when packing it up for the “off-season.” Importantly, as the example uses a total of 1,200 LEDs, an ample 5V power supply is needed, individually connected to each strip to avoid voltage drop along the chain.

Code is available via the project’s write-up, plus several clips of it in action. It’s a fun example, and a concept that’s flexible enough (both literally and figuratively) to use in a wide variety of physical situations, potentially with hardware that you have on-hand.