Continued Development

Here are some ideas for pathways to continue developing your DirtyWatts Micro-Indicator once you have tried out customising the Algorithm.

Case

You’ve got a pile of electronics, but nothing to hold the guts in. You could make a case from anything! You could design and 3D print one, laser cut one, or even cobble together one out of a cardboard box.

It’s a good idea to diffuse the light coming out of your LEDs, you can use baking paper, translucent acrylic, or a wall mount LED housing from a home-improvement store.

Alternative Outputs

There’s no reason you have to stick to the addressable LED outputs, try hooking up other outputs! The same place you configure the NeoPixel LEDs, you could also configure and output to a dot-matrix display, display the percent renewable on a couple of 8 segment displays, etc. How can you add more useful dimensions to the output?

Battery Powered

Right now, your NodeMCU has to be connected to a computer or wall-socket to run. What about giving your Micro-Indicator freedom from the wall? You could build a standard USB power pack into your case, or get a bit more fancy and run some rechargeable batteries with a voltage regulator into the 5v port on the microcontroller.

Light Animations

You've got these fancy NeoPixel LED's as your indicator light, which lets you control every single LED individually. We've been taking a hammer to that feature by controlling the whole strip as one block. You can change that, and unlock its superpower! You could make animations when it features new data, or you could even convey more dimensions than just a single colour through partitioning your lights.