Is there something worse than getting on the freeway on your morning commute, simply to search out that site visitors is worse than normal because of an accident or a lightweight drizzle? In the event you’re late yet one more time, your boss might be going to put in writing you up! One answer is to get up early and begin your commute early to offer your self some buffer time, however that’s ridiculous and no sane particular person would even try it. Michael Rechtin made much better use of his time by spending numerous hours constructing this good espresso desk that shows real-time site visitors circumstances.
Rechtin lives within the stunning metropolis of Cincinnati, Ohio. Like most American metropolitan areas, it has a spiderweb of interstates and main highways that function the primary arteries of commuter site visitors. As soon as a minute, Rechtin’s espresso desk checks site visitors circumstances on all of these thoroughfares and exhibits the outcomes on illuminated map representations. Whereas he sips his espresso, Rechtin can look on the map to see if he wants to select up the tempo or if he can get pleasure from a extra leisurely morning.
To create the map that serves as the bottom of the espresso desk, Rechtin began with a sheet of thick plywood. He then used a big CNC router to carve the most important roads, highways, and interstates into the floor of the wooden. He additionally reduce within the Ohio River, which winds by Cincinnati and is a distinguished characteristic of the town.
To make the roads and highways stand out, Rechtin lined the cuts in clean paint. The river acquired much more particular remedy. Rechtin stuffed that in with a lightweight blue resin (for MSLA 3D printers), then put your complete sheet of plywood out within the solar for a handful of seconds to shortly treatment the resin. That makes the river actually stand out and it seems to be nice.
The site visitors circumstances show is made up of strips of WS2812b individually addressable RGB LEDs embedded in 3D-printed translucent plastic. Rechtin printed that plastic on an Elegoo OrangeStorm Giga, which is a large 3D printer with an 800×800mm mattress.
A Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B controls these LEDs, altering the colours from inexperienced to yellow if site visitors is heavy and to purple if site visitors is bumper-to-bumper. The Raspberry Pi will get that data from the TomTom API, which is free to make use of when the software program stays under the request restrict. To keep away from exceeding that restrict, Rechtin got here up with a intelligent workaround: pulling the town map in chunks after which analyzing the picture coloration at particular factors to search out the site visitors circumstances at these coordinates.
After including a body and a few legs, Rechtin’s good espresso desk was completed. It already seems to be nice when displaying the site visitors circumstances, however Rechtin additionally applied some LED results modes which are extra visually interesting for these instances when site visitors doesn’t matter.