On Air / Off Air

A beautiful LED sign with a corresponding website to let people know when you're in important meetings.

Hardware

The Hardware side is based on the Adafruit YouTube On Air Sign. The parts I'm using are the

• 64x32 RGB LED Matrix with 4mm pitch
• Adafruit Matrix Portal M4

Thanks to the Matrix Portal this is very plug&play.

Software

Sign

I used the Adafruit project as a starting point, there's a lot of example projects to run on the matrix, so you know the lights can blink.

Then I took the YouTube on air sign and adjusted the code to communicate with my server to get the current status and fetch the current time for night mode (see /sign).

To monitor the output you can use the screen command with your specific tty device.

screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1101 115200

Server

This is using flask and a simple bootstrap template to give the user two buttons to press. So they can show if they are ON AIR or OFF AIR.

To get the server running use something like this:

python3 -m flask --debug run --host 0.0.0.0 --port 6006

Note on Watchdog

There are a few issues with the ESP becoming unresponsive on the current version I'm using (CircuitPython latest stable release 7.3.3 and FW 1.2.2) so I've added a watchdog. The maximum timeout is 16 and it will reset the board once the timeout is exceeded. If there's any issues accessing code.py because of watchdog resets you can enter safe mode and remove it.