Following up from my Webcam Activity Notifier project, I loaded that project onto a Raspberry Pi Zero W and wired up 3 LED’s on a prototyping board, connecting them to a GPIO header on the PiZero.
I found a neat On-Air project box from Thingiverse, so I threw that into Cura and about 11 hours later the full project box was printed.
The wiring was fairly simple, a > 50 ohm resistor connected between the ground and the LED. They all share a hot wire from the GPIO 5v pin.
Python has a Raspberry Pi wrapper that allows you to easily control the GPIO pins, so turning on/off the LED’s is trivial. You can take a look at the ledcontroller.py in the Python project for an example of the code
The finished project worked out pretty well, it lets guests in the house know when it’s ok to enter the office and when I’m in a meeting or in a video call in a non-disruptive way.
The next iteration of the project will probably include nano LED strips instead of singular hobby LED’s so I can change colors and have finer light sources diffused better
