Well, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.

The show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, have you noticed, is that time of year, have you noticed the extra gear over in

the office, the piles of what looks like Christmas lights hooked up the circuits?

I did see those.

I got to tell you what I'm up to.

I think my listeners will appreciate this.

So for Halloween, I have a front porch.

And I typically put Halloween lights all the way around this front porch up on below

the gutters.

So what I wanted to try this year was programmable LED.

So this looks like a normal strand of Christmas lights.

But there's a data bus connecting every one of these bulbs.

They are individually addressable by a microcontroller.

So you can program any type of arbitrary pattern of lights you want.

You can turn each light off and on and set its color and brightness individually.

So I have 200 of these lights.

I'm powering them off of a 12 volt power source, which is enough to get brightness down

the entire line without power injection.

And I'm building a control box, a waterproof control box that's going to have the power

sources and Arduino Nano that I'm using, that I'm mounting with screw terminals into

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