MessageBar

A personal exploration into the Internet of Things, blending text animation with real-world data. This pixel display brings together time, weather, and personalized messages, birthdays and more through many API integrations.

MessageBar is a personal project I developed to delve into IoT and learn about integrating various APIs. It's a long, pixel display that animates text, showing time, weather, and responding to sensors like temperature and sound. Notably, it connects with a weather API and an energy consumption API from my home. Its unique feature is integration with a Telegram chatbot, allowing friends to send messages that appear on the bar for 24 hours. This offers a novel way of communication, different from instant messaging, focusing on sending thoughtful updates or jokes.

This project was an exercise in self-learning, from setting up the system to programming and designing. The casing, made of hand-bendable laser-cut aluminum, is simple yet elegant. Having tested it in my home and shared it with others, I'm exploring how this form of communication is received, reflecting my journey in system design and development.

Images

Reflection

I started this project to learn how to develop a connected system and package it in a cool way. So far this has been quite successfull as I was able to make and distribute a multitude of these products. I leaned about databases, hosting serverless functuons, sheet metal design, using git and many more things. The fun thing is that even after building it, the product remains alive and provides new data and funny chat messages each day.