During the planning of our Christmas card at work this year, a mad idea came up. Do we ignore mad ideas? No, we tackle them head-on.
The idea was to build an internet-controlled snow machine - you'd hit the button on the website, and watch a member of the Torchbox team get pelted with snow. When we first came up with the idea, we dismissed it as being "too complex", but after a while, we came around.
Cue three days of frantic development and phoning round to get the parts. I'll be posting a full build article, with all our source code, once we're done.
The brief summary is that we have a Django app which handles rate-limiting of snow, and tracking who has clicked the button, which then communicates with our snow machine using Artnet and DMX. Ustream is used to stream the video back to the internet.
Still, I imagine you want to see it in action, so head over to snow.torchbox.com, and have a go. It's only online 10 - 5 UK time, and only until Tuesday (we can't fill our office up with paper snow forever), but it's still very good fun, even if you don't know any of us!