The holidays are a lot of fun, and I’ve built a thing to bring some of that holiday excitement into my office. We use Microsoft Teams, leveraging using Microsoft Graph I’ve created a bit of art that bring a little holiday cheer to my workspace.

I’ve created this fancy wreath that hangs in my office.

While a lovely addition to my office, it has that added mad scientist flair. Hidden inside the wreath is a NodeMCU board featuring an Espessif ESP8266 microcontroller. This little microcontroller is the big brother to one you may already have in your house. If you have a Wi-Fi controlled light, outlet, or other accessory, it very likely has an Espessif made control chip.

The NodeMCU gets a signal from a companion application on my PC that sets the neopixel (WS2811B) led lights to match the Team Availability status of each of my coworkers.

Using the same technology I also have a little tree that sits in my office.

The colors are a little too intense for the phone camera, but they are red, green and orange matching the online status of my team members.

This is actually an extension of a project I created during the lockdown when the kids were home from school. I had a lantern outside my office that would show red if I was in a meeting, and green otherwise. This let the kids know if they could ask me questions.

Setup of this is a little involved, but if anyone is interested in a detailed walkthrough of the process, comment below and I’ll write one up. If you want to get started on LED art like this, here is a course I’ve run a few times on starting with this technology: AardvarkMan/UltimateBlinkinLightClass: Code and Resources for the Ultimate Blinkin Light Class

I hope you enjoyed a peak into my mad scientist office and how I like to spread cheer this time of year. Have a great holiday season and happy new year!