Planning to trigger your new years celebrations at precisely the moment of the calendar flip tomorrow night? Cabe Atwell created a project tutorial for how to use a Raspberry Pi and a set of relays to trigger an event at a precise pre-scheduled moment.

In this case, setting off festive fireworks, but if you wanted to use a similar setup to activate over 500m of LED strips, that’s okay, too. 😉

The countdown to the countdown has begun! Do you have time to tackle your own NYE timer? Thanks to Andrew Fustini for the tip!

New Year’s Eve Countdown Timer With Fireworks Launching Ability:

New Year’s Eve (NYE) is always fun, especially when something fun happens at the zero time. Launching fireworks seems to be the default response to the calendar change. Having it do off exactly as the year comes to a close is key. The person that is often required to light those wicks loses out to enjoying that moment. (They have to be on the ready to do whatever task is needed…)
This project is for those lonely and wayward souls.

This setup and forget countdown timer that activates 10 relays for the last 10 seconds of the year. Like a switch, a relays can turn on/off anything that can be turned on/off. So, this project could just turn off all the lights in a house for a dark and private NYE, to blaring ten electric boat horns for the annoying party.

Do anything you want with the relays… I chose to launch a single firework at the zero second. I chose this mainly to give a simple way of handling launching of fireworks remotely. (I would like to add, much safer too. No more light the wick and run like crazy…)

Here were my requirements of the “CANYECT WFLA”:

• Grab the time from the Raspberry Pi clock.
• Countdown from any time showing DAYS:HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS
• As the timer get closer to zero… it will truncate what is not necessary anymore, starting with days. Then hours, and finally minutes. On the last 15 seconds… the last numbers will fill the screen.
• On the last 10 seconds of the countdown, the RPi will activate (or deactivate) 10 relays.
• (For my example) Launch fireworks on the last second, wirelessly.

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