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cubiclesociety · 7 years ago

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Stranger Things Themed Party

Whether you’re throwing a Stranger Things premiere watch party or themed office/birthday party, planning and preparation is key to delivering a truly immersive Stranger experience to your party people.

There are a number of sites and blogs out there that provide good ideas for a Stranger Things themed party – e.g. hanging lights on the ceiling, picking a costume to wear, putting up some posters, etc. This post focuses on ideas that I either needed help with or didn’t see posted anywhere online. I’ll start with the most time-consuming and painful yet rewarding project for the party, the Alphabet Wall.

The Alphabet Wall

Using a Raspberry Pi, electrical components, some Node JavaScript, a set of addressable lights and some cloud-based services, I created a Stranger Things inspired alphabet wall that accepts and displays SMS text messages. There are other useful sites that provide details on how to create an alphabet wall but needed to customize code to 1. meet my specific SMS and animation requirements and 2. run on Node JS and on a Raspberry Pi 3 that I already owned.

Here’s a quick summary of the features of my Node JS program (if you’re looking to compare this with other alphabet wall code programs):

The program listens to a Google Firebase instance for new text messages. It will continually run, process and display new messages in real-time (from Firebase).

When a new text message is received, it “flashes” the entire strand for a pre-defined interval (e.g. 5 seconds) to give the audience a heads up a new message is coming through - “hey all, pay attention to the wall!!”

For each letter of a message, the code provides a smooth transition between lighting each letter - it’s not an abrupt on/off between letters.

It provides options to turn on debugging to help test and troubleshoot the program.

Along with the Node JS program, Twilio, Zapier and Firebase cloud services (free trials) were setup and configured to enable SMS text messaging. For more details on these services as well as the Node JS program, please visit the GitHub wiki page at https://github.com/andreburton/stranger-things-wall/wiki/Stranger-Things-Wall-Code-Overview.

In terms of the hardware, here are the various components purchased (with Amazon links where applicable) for the project:

ALITOVE WS2811 LED addressable lights

5V, 4A 20W charger – used to power the LED lights

Raspberry Pi 3

NOOBS memory card

5V, 2.5A charger – used to power the Raspberry Pi

Electronics components kit with a breadboard

DC power jack 5.5mm x 2.1mm CCTV power jack adapter

1N4001 diode – I ended up purchasing a full set since the individual packs where only a few bucks less. I also didn’t find a components kit with the right diode type

80s fabric – I went to a fabric store, bought a yard and a half of fabric that resembled the wallpaper from the series. I hemmed the edges to make it feel like a professional product

Black paint – I bought a $4 sample of Behr semi-gloss from Home Depot used to paint the letters

Foam brush – used to paint the letters onto the fabric

Clear packing tape – used to hang the lights and the final product

I ended up spending about $140 for all parts although you could get it done for less – e.g. print out the letters and tape them to your wall, only buy the jump wires (not the entire components kit), use materials you already have, etc.

You will need to setup the circuitry to power the components and route the signals between the Raspberry Pi and the WS2811 LED strand. The following site provides excellent descriptions and diagrams of how to setup your hardware (I used the diode wiring approach): https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixels-on-raspberry-pi/wiring.

Here’s a picture of my circuit (note, when I setup the level-converter chip wiring configuration, I somehow toasted the integrated chip, so I went with the diode approach and shifted the design down by 20 pins on the breadboard):

On the WS2811 side, be sure to put electrical tape over the two “loose” wires (red and blue) and connect the Pi and breadboard three wires to the 3pin JST connector with male connections (ignore the colors to the pin since they unfortunately don’t match what I have running from the Pi and breadboard).

A few lessons learned and considerations for you based on my experience implementing the alphabet wall:

The approximate size of my letters are approximately 3.5 x 4.5 inches. I used the full length of the strand. If you want to make your alphabet wall letters larger, you will need an additional strand.

Definitely consider placing the lights above the letters. I placed the lights below the letters thinking that less wiring would be needed when hooking the strand up to the power source. It was a mistake; gravity kept pulling the lights down away from the letters and the amount of wiring saved was insignificant.

Make sure you have enough Dupont male to female wires. I had several 8 inch wires that I had to piece together to bind the pi/breadboard to the strand hanging on the wall. I didn’t have matching wire colors the more I tied together, which wasn’t necessarily an issue, but ideally, you’d get longer wires or more matching color wires.

Zapier has a really short trial period so you may want to consider setting that up last or making sure you have someone you can setup a new account and share those credentials with you. Also, Zapier only allows for a 5 minute polling interval (nothing shorter). I believe that Twilio may have a new option to push new messages to Firebase directly but I didn’t explore it given time constraints.

Consider placing the alphabet wall over the TV so people could see text messages come in as they were watching the show (if people are actively watching TV).

I did start off building the alphabet wall program in Python but redirected my effort on building it in Node JS since Python wasn’t able to wait and listen for new Firebase messages - this function was critical to enabling the wait-for-SMS-messages feature of the alphabet wall.

Cocktails

My Stranger Things inspired cocktails made references to the series. Here are some of the drinks I served along with their ingredients and instructions:

Eleven’s Eggo Heaven

Ingredients:

1.5 oz of Appleton Rum

.5 oz of butterscotch schnapps

.5 oz of cinnamon schnapps (e.g. Goldschlager)

.5 oz of Mrs Buttersworth Syrup

2 oz of milk

Dash of cinnamon (powder)

1 Eggo mini waffle

Instructions: Mix the bourbon, schnapps, milk and syrup together with ice for 15 seconds. Shake and strain into a glass. Sprinkle the dash of cinnamon on the drink and garnish the glass with the Eggo mini waffle. Encourage the drinker to dip the waffle into the drink for maximum enjoyment.

Old Fashioned Demogorgan

Ingredients:

1.5 oz of bourbon or whiskey

1 sugar cube

Dash of orange bitters

1 teaspoon of water

1 fresh orange wheel

1 ice cube

1 dried mission fig

Instructions: Muddle the sugar cube and bitters with one bar spoon of water at the bottom of a glass. Mix in bourbon or whisky and finish muddling in the sugar with the liquid. Cut the fig into 5 parts to make it look like a demogorgan head (see picture below). Add ice, orange wheel and the demogorgan head (fig).

I served and printed out a cocktails menu in advance. On the menu, I included some images from the series to make it feel a little playful, for example…

80s Music

Surprisingly, when I asked Alexa (Amazon Echo) to play 80s music, the music played was solid. If you don’t have an Echo or an 80s playlist handy, here is a starter list of songs to play:

Thriller by Michael Jackson

Take on Me by A-ha

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears

Every Breath You Take by The Police

Easy Lover by Philip Bailey (with Phil Collins)

Let’s Hear It for the Boy by Deniece Williams

Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper

Every Time You Go Away by Paul Young

I Can’t Go for That by Hall & Oates

Getting the Message Out

I created a funny email with references to the series - e.g. come hungry, we’re serving demogorgan meat pizza - readers, don’t worry, it was just sausage, I’m not equipped with the skills to hunt down a real live demogorgan or demodog. I also created a flyer with birthday girl’s face inserted (created with Gimp).

Good luck on hosting your Stranger Things party! Let me know if this was helpful, how it goes or if you have new, fresh Stranger Things party-related ideas you’d like to share.

#stranger things #halloween themed #party ideas #halloween #demogorgon #raspberry pi #node js

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