Show HN: Control My Lights

Hello HN,

I am proud to present my latest project, controlmylights.net, an interactive lighting installation that you can control via a website, Twitch chat or YouTube Chat. This is also a fundraiser for Feeding America (I’m using Tiltify, so your money goes straight to Feeding America, I never touch it). I graduated college in May and found that there were some skills I didn’t have, so I used this project to learn them. I made the website front-end using ReactJS and made the mockup for it using Figma. I am building the site to a static file to decrease loading time, and server load. I learned all about NodeJS’s async properties and NodeJS’s promises, in addition to what blocking/non-blocking Arduino operations were. I relearned OpenFrameworks to make the animations when you choose a color. Also, I implemented a messaging middleware architecture to my project that originally used a custom Express.js+SocketIO solution, then moved everything to Redis Pub/Sub and a Redis queue. In addition to all of that I learned some of what it takes to build a “real-time” application. It’s hard! The slowest part of my application is the delay on Twitch/YouTube, when you send a command to the system it executes immediately.

If you want to know all about the build process you can read it here (it’s long):

[link redacted]