A couple of years ago my friend Jeff was cleaning out his storage unit and he came across the NYC Train Sign that he received from a now-defunct Kickstarter campaign that never took off, err I should say it took off but the company only ended up sending out a handful of the signs and ran away with the rest of the money, that’s a story for another time.
Anyways Jeff had no need for it and I guess I was chatting with him at the right time as he shipped it to me. I had big plans for it, but with the move and house renovation projects it went into my storage area where it was collecting dust, that is until last night.
I was chatting with some friends about the LED matrices and remembered I had this nice setup in my storage being unused so I dug it out. I got it all fired up and joined my Wifi (The backend of the device is a Raspberry Pi 3 B). After playing with it for a few minutes I got it to display an image to the LED.
The plan this coming week is to create some on-call images that can be used eg “On a Zoom Call” or “On a Google Meet” something along those lines and then mount it outside my office door so Nicole and the kids don’t barge in when I am in the middle of a call.
I had come across this script earlier last week which while intended for call status being able to change the color of Phillips Hue bulbs I think it can be adapted to send the status to the NYC Train Sign instead.