For the summer I am hosting the Minecraft server of a friend that don’t want to let the computer run when he is away. But the server crashed a few times, so I wanted a way to monitor it’s health. Also, one of my kid want to know when user are connected to join them. So I needed to know if the server was OK or not and when OK how many user connected.
So once I had my Blink! and I saw the Men in Space counter, I decided to build something similar with the count of Minecraft connected user: Twitter post with video demonstrating the result
About at the same time, I went to IKEA and got a FADO lamp as suggest by @Pimoroni. I made two different version of color ball with a LED inside:
The Blinkt! version cost less and is not as bright as the Unicorn pHAT version. Blinkt! is sufficient for an ambiant light indicator.
When using the Blinkt! (or the Unicorn pHAT) it is best to display the same color on every pixels as they can not be distinguished. But my code to count the number of user connected to the Minecraft server could not be used. So I had to work on other way to display the number. After some hard blinking solution, I found that Fade in and out was the less disturbing way to communicate. And here is the result: Twitter post with video of the fade in fade out when two user are connected
The source code, instruction, documentation for the Minecraft monitoring Blink! can be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/dglaude/minecraftstatus-blinkt
If you like any of those project, please retweet them on Twitter. I posted many other project.
PS: There is one trick about internet connectivity of this. I use a Raspberry Pi Zero inside, but I power it with a Google Chromecast key power supply. That power supply has an ethernet port and is automatically detected by Raspbian. So with a single cable you have power and network delivered.