🚀 | Light bar for status and fancy looks

[jdeitmerg]

Feature

Controlling an LED strip that is mechanically integrated into the Phoniebox. The LEDs are supposed to look nice and also show status information, see below.

User perspective

As a user, I want my Phoniebox to have a fancy light bar that

1. Distinguishes my box from my siblings' boxes
2. Shows the following status information:
   1. Booting
   2. Booted / Ready
   3. Charging
   4. Done charging / battery full
   5. Volume
   6. Sync status
   7. Battery level
   8. Battery low alert
   9. Shutting down
3. Dim down at night so the light looking nice at day doesn't light my whole bedroom at night.

Further information

The Phonieboxes I built feature a light bar. It contains a simple strip of addressable LEDs (WS2812 or similar) and even with a static color it looks fancy:

For Christmas the static colors were enough, but now I want to take it to the next level 🚀

Concept

The rough plan is:

• Show the "ownership color" solidly by default.
• All other states are only shown when they are active (charging, done charging, syncing, battery low) or have just been changed (volume).
• The battery level could be displayed by a short press of the power button.
• The "booting" state can't be solved on the Raspberry Pi, I have Raspberry Pi Picos for that, we'll see.

Going forward

I plan to implement this for my kids' boxes but think this could be of use to others as well.

[s-martin]

That's a cool new feature, thanks for bringing it up.