New developments!

I decided that all the effort in measuring electricity and gas shouldn't go unnoticed in the house, so I decided to make a light indicating the status of the house. Furthermore, when arriving home, the only way to know if someone had rang he door was to check my intranet (on the iPod Touch), although, at work I can see it in twitter anyway.

So, I bought an RGB led, one with 6 legs - strange - the pinout is in the image. Some simple connections to the Arduino and a small fading program later, and I had an initial prototype.


My idea is to have a small switch connected to it to reset the doorbell indicator.

So on to the enclosure.
I had laying around a ball from some promotional thing, which splits in 2 halves. The ball is rather big - about 7cm in diameter - which makes it look good, and has a rough finish which is also good to difuse the light...although not good enough. So I tried roughing it further with sandpaper and some other mechanical tools, but no good result. The solution appears to be paint! - A light cover of white paint from a can.



I made all these experiments in one of the halves, now i have the other half to do the real thing. Hopefully soon!