Chapter 5. Internet-Connected Giraffe Mood Lamp

By Brian Corteil

The idea for the lamp in Figure 5-1 started while walking around my local B & Q store (similar to Home Depot in the US). I spotted a child’s night-light in the shape of a giraffe, and picked it up. I realized that with luck I would be able to remove the base, and use it as a diffuser for a mood lamp that I wanted to make for my wife Sarah, who loves giraffes.

I chose to use the Raspberry Pi to be the brains of this project for two reasons: the ease of connecting it to the Internet, and because it uses Python as one of its many programming languages. Apart from changing color, I wanted the lamp to be able to receive Twitter messages. I decided to design the lamp to check Twitter ...

Get Make: Raspberry Pi and AVR Projects now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.