Raspberry PI LED-API

I received a very fortunate gift recently a B1248 LED badge. The led badge came with support software that ran only on windows and worked fairly well. However, given my love for engineering, I began to look around for ways to program it and gain complete control over it. I stumbled upon a fantastic library. This worked almost completely out of the box on my Raspberry Pi 3. However merely implementing something someone else has developed is more of an operations task. Me being on the development side of things thought of ways to improve it and I came up with this.

I build a simple flask app around it and gave it a REST interface. Sample code for which can be found here. I am always open to pull requests and public contributions. However, building a REST API wasn’t enough for me so I went ahead and ‘Containerized’ the app meaning that we would have to ironically use ‘-v’ during ‘docker run’ to mount a port. This REST API can be used to transmit very useful and critical information such as the example given below.

The original idea was to monitor all my VPS’s and check for downtime. However the library I use doesn’t support multi line text, which makes it not very useful to have lots of text in a marquee. It would also be really nice if this could show the current response time for all my API’s.

Scope for improvement:

• Figure out multi-line text.
• Separate the 2 processes into their own microservices.
• Implement a queueing mechanism such as Kafka or RabbitMQ to read from MySql.
• Further Extend the API to show either weather information or trending #tags.