GOAL

Create a Stranger Things-style alphabet wallboard that

  1. Looks reasonably authentic, or as authentic as possible on the cheap
  2. Is easy to control, including
  3. The ability to spot particular viewers and send a custom message on the fly
  4. Could be completed in the month or so we had leading up to Halloween

This is accomplished by

  1. An arduino controlling WS2812B LEDs
  2. A PC running
  3. A PowerShell webserver that communicates with the Arduino and
  4. YAWCAM for monitoring who is viewing the board

I work in IT in a large company that is almost exclusively a Microsoft environment. A Raspberry Pi would have been more than sufficient as the web server and webcam host, but I know PowerShell and we have a large supply of Windows machines in inventory (for the same reason that the lights are strung together with the innards of cat5). The JS on the client side was for me, a bigger challenge than the PowerShell.