I am kind of in two minds about posting this little bit of frivolity from Jeremy Blythe: it’s the sort of ingenious, silly project that made me laugh when I saw it and I wanted to share it with you; but it’s hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Raspberry Pis are not built for the sort of traffic that the things that get posted here tend to get. In short, once I’ve hit the publish button, it’s likely that this particular project will get knocked over – so if you can’t see it, wander over instead to Jeremy’s Raspberry Pi page for more inspiration, and try again later.
What Jeremy has done here is to use a Raspberry Pi to stream content from a webcam on a webpage. So far, so run-of-the-mill, you say. But the content he’s streaming is the output from a 7-segment LED display, also driven by the Raspberry Pi, which gets its instructions via the Raspberry Pi’s network connection from people like me with nothing better to do on the internet.
The entry from Santa Ana, California at the top (and the choice of number) is me. I'm in America again, bigging up the Raspberry Pi to anyone who will listen, and making Raspberry Pis 5000 miles away display numbers *because I can*. Click the image to visit the cam and to add your own number.
The webcam won’t be up all the time (Jeremy is using his Raspberry Pi for other things too), and, as I mentioned above, it’s unlikely to be up at all if everybody reading this tries to visit it at the same time. You can read more about the setup on Jeremy’s blog. Jeremy: apologies for accidentally DDoSing your Raspberry Pi. I did it with the best of intentions.
