In my first attempt at Physical Website Monitoring I used some 8 bit shift registers and tri-colour LEDs. This while fun, was hard work. Each green, red and blue along with the earth legs of the LED had to be soldered and wired up. That’s OK for a small project but I wanted to expand to 10+ monitoring locations.

So plan B was to use Neopixels, as usual Adafruit has a great guide for them. I had some no brand ones lying around from a while back. You can buy the “branded” ones from any of the major online retailers or you can go cheap from eBay.

Wiring them up is nice and simple. Just solder them together in serial following the arrows on their backs. They only have 3 pins: 5v, earth and data.

I roughly measured the distance between locations I am monitoring from to measure the length of cable, and then solder the Neopixels together. I ran out of black wire pretty quick, which is why there is more red, sorry for any confusion. Below shows them attached to the back of the map.

The code for controlling the lights is listed below:

View the code on Gist.

I borrowed most of it from the example in Adafruit’s library for the Neopixel. I can’t stress enough how excellent Adafruit is a resource of how to do stuff!

You can test everything is working from the serial port of the Arduino. Send “sydney down

” and Sydney will change to red, “slow” will change it to orange instead. “up” resets it to green.

The script below is some basic Python to fetch the last response time from Server Density and decided what if at all the colour of a location should be changed to. It’s all a bit rough around the edges but you get the idea.

View the code on Gist.

Below is it in action from the serial port:

