OK, so this has been an internal Zeroseven secret for a while, but now it's time to let it out of the bag on how nerdy we really can get...

I was a looking for a new programming challenge a couple of years ago and stumbled (probably via a YouTube video) across the Arduino electronics platform. For around $60 I bought the Arduino plus a few other bits and bobs (wires, LEDs, resistors and board to

connect them) and set about investigating how to use it.

The microcontroller chip (the brain of the Arduino) can be programmed using the proprietary language, with completed programs uploaded to the chip via USB.

The language is simple, but does what is needed to listen to and control the many digital and analogue inputs and outputs available.

After office discussions and inspiration from the energy orb and TodBot, it was decided that my project should be to create a globe that changes colour based on the traffic on a website. This also aligned nicely with my statistics obsession, providing a method of keeping an eye on real-time website traffic without having to refresh a stats page or wait for Google Analytics to catch up..

So, two years since it's debut in the office, let us present to you, the SiteLite!

The video below, shows how the Site Light changes colour based on the number of page impressions on the Zeroseven website. As it approaches red, it is indicating that we are getting several times our average traffic (I have the measure set to average number of hits on the site per minute, so the 20 or so in the video is a several times higher than our average number of page impressions in an hour), apologies for the video quality.

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Posted in: General, Zeroseven, Inspiration