Continued Development

Here’s 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, Lazer cut one, or even cobble together one out of a carboard 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.