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CarSwitch

I liked the idea of having a custom LED display in my car to send notices to the person in the car behind me.

The CarSwitch is a Particle Photon connected to five buttons which are mounted in a custom case. Additionally a DFPlayer Mini is connected to the photon to play funny sounds by pressing a button. The LED display supports scrolling text, static text and different colors.

Unfortunately custom LED displays are not allowed in the traffic rules so the display is not connected to the photon while the CarSwitch is mounted inside the car.

 

Photon GameBuzzer

The photon is able to act as a native keyboard so I decided to build an input device for some computer games. The main parts are the big red and green push buttons which act as classic game buzzers. When pressing one of the big push buttons the WS2812B LED matrix lights green or red depending on button which was pressed first. Additionally the DFPlayer mini which is connected by UART to the photon is playing a buzzer sound on the small speaker.

The five additional buttons are used to trigger additional keys which are useful while playing games.

 

Photon “No!”-Button

While searching for the perfect button it stumbled across the “No!”-Button and was able to build a photon into it:

This button connects to a WS2812B lightstrip surrounding my bed which makes a nice indirect light source.

The speaker in the “No!-“Button is also connected to the photon so it can play a nice Super Mario theme when double pressing the button.