Adding Foursquare check-ins to the display

[jeffro]

This year, I wanted to add some interactivity for the visitors to our light display. I spent a good deal of time thinking of how to incorporate this, how I could involve people with the whole concept of visiting and viewing our lights.

I'm a software engineer by trade, so I gravitate to the software side of things. As I thought about it, our light display is a destination for our visitors. As a destination, it's a physical place -- and locations are getting a lot of attention these days.

With services like Foursquare and Facebook and Google and quite a few others building this action around "check-ins", I thought that would be cool. I could encourage our visitors to "check-in" at my location, and I could then use that check-in information within the display in some way.

I don't have a giant LED board to display a nice scrolling message (though I'd like to build one, but that's another project), but I do have an RDS-capable FM transmitter. So, I decided to create an application to push location check-ins at our display out to our visitors through RDS.

I've written about the process on my site: http://www.greenlakechristmas.com/20...o-the-display/

I'm continually tweaking the application, making it more robust and efficient. Anyway, welcome any thoughts or suggestions.

Cheers.

[Joefunkx]

That's an awesome idea! Nice work.

[DIY Sparks]

You binary artists will rule the world, jeffro. Neat idea.