Background

I wanted to make an LED status orb that would get my attention when sitting at my desk. No real problem to solve here except I wanted to experiment with AWS Lambda to fire events down to this device sitting on my local network. In the meantime, I created the hardware device (pictured here) and a simple web app running on Heroku to change the colors of the orb. When it was all up and running you could connect to the Heroku app on your mobile phone and remotely change the color of the orb. IoT power!

Here's the project on Hackster.io.

Here's the app code for Heroku. Not sure if it still works now, but it could.

lol. Looks like I wrote it with jQuery Mobile and I was not too happy about it.

Assembly

Here are the parts I used. The base is a face-cream jar I nabbed from recycling. The orb part is a cheap LED party orb I bought on Amazon and gutted.

Particle Photon and NeoPixels. You can build a square out of them if you use right-angle headers between them.

Here's the setup. If you use solid-core wire it can be structural—here it's holding up the LED quad.

Back and front of the perfboard.

Testing the colors.

Putting it together! I used some hot glue and Sugru to make it all fit and stay together.

Looks nice!