Front Porch Indicator

A device to indicate whether you are on your front porch, and see if your friends are as well

The Story Behind the Project

This one has a great story. My friend and I were goofing off one night, and mourning the lack of front-porch socialization that occurs these days (especially in our old college neighborhood with so many great front porches), and coming up with "business models" to market front porches better. One of the rediculous ideas we came up with was an "FPI" (Front Porch Indicator) that would be the new social network to show who was on their front porch and if they wanted company to sit quietly, chat, or have an FPP (Front Porch Party) with multiple people.

I decided that this FPI device actually wouldn't be terribly difficult to make, and so I set out to make one (seen above). I didn't expect the LCD UI to be so difficult to program, and the code for that is a tad spaghetti-looking, but otherwise it works, supports several dozen devices, and I plan to make a few more for our mutual friends in our last semester living in the same neighborhood together.

Features

• Each device stores a local copy of the state of every other client, and updates it when other clients send state updates

• The display is sorted so that people with green indicator lights appear on top (you would not BELEIVE how difficult this was to do)

• Users can press buttons to scroll the display if more than 4 clients are online (again, rediculously complicated when combined with the above)

• Users can change the wifi network that the device is connected to

• Users can change their LED color as well as name and status directly from the device, using a custom-made "keyboard" of sorts pictured above