Turn an LED Strip into a Google Calendar

If only life had a progress bar, that would be handy.

Unfortunately, you can’t make a progress bar to show how you are through life, but you can make one to show how far you are through chunks of life/work/school with our handy little guide.

Whether you’re a

“Wow, look at that: 75 percent of the day remaining, I have ample time to bind that memo to Geoff Linton about bobble hats for plant watering robots”,

or a

“90 percent: just another 40 minutes of browsing r/antiwork and I can get out of this hell hole”

kind of person, the progress bar will come in rather handy. As a bonus, it displays what’s on your Google Calendar so that you can keep an eye on whats going on.

Building Your Own

It’s a good starter project for someone that wants to learn about building a micro controller. You’ll need:

• A WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi Pico,

• an addressable LED strip

• a couple of optional bits and pieces (if you want to make a housing for the light)

and a little patience, and soon you’ll be the envy of your peers.

There’s a video of us making one below, and all the code and build instructions that you need can be found here as well as links to the materials you’ll need. Since making the video, we’ve simplified the connection to Google Calendar and made a few other improvements.

Progress Bar Build