My 2 year old nephew, Castle, likes pushing buttons—especially ones that turn lights on. When a Christmas tree appeared one year, and lights were put up, he was very excited. At the same time, I was experimenting with Puck.js, a programmable low-power bluetooth button, and had a brainwave—I could combine my nephew's love of buttons and of lights. A true Christmas miracle.

Armed with a Puck.js and a bluetooth-powered power outlet, I decided to make the Christmas lights magic. I dug into the code, Puck.js documentation, and seemingly oft-ignored specifications, eventually reverse engineering the whole thing. The result was this:

But that wasn't enough. I decided to build a site around it, showing how it worked—an interactive instruction manual you might say—while learning more about design, SVG animation, and the occasional perils of the tools we choose to use.

[INSERT GIF OF castle.christmas]

All so my nephew could press a button and see some magic happen.

Most of the vector graphics: Vectors by Vecteezy

See LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2019 Chris Castle