As the weather is warming up here in Norway — my kids have gotten their bikes out. To make it more fun, both for them and me, I figured I’d build a series of traffic signals that they could play with.

I first started with a traffic light, simple — red, yellow and green. To control it I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, this will allow me to make it communicate on Wi-Fi and MQTT later.

My kids wanted traffic lights for their LEGO city, so first I had to build a traffic lights controller.

My twins and I both like LEGO, and LEDs. I figured I’d make some simple LED street lights that we could use to build a LEGO scenery.

I’m using Prometheus to monitor my home office and homelab, I figured it would be cool to have a stack light show the active warnings and alerts from Alertmanager. So I made a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi to drive a five-colored stack light.

I made a simple HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi to read multiple DS18B20 temperature sensors — it was surprisingly easy. I used the measured temperatures to control a fan using Home Assistant.