ECE 4180 - Design Project

3D Printer Status Lights - Invention Studio @ Georgia Tech

Group Memebers

• Brandon Redder
• Seth Peden
• Dylan Mauldin
• Jacob Southerland

Purpose

• The invention studio has 30 3D printers
• They are each controlled by a web management system with Raspberry PI’s
• There is no easy way to physically see the statuses of the printers

Hardware

• Each printer is already connected to a Raspberry Pi v3
• The status lights are ShiftBrite SPI LEDs (shift registers)
• Each printer has one light connected to it
• Initial designs for the project utilized discrete RGB LEDs or an alternate microcontroller (with embedded RGB LED)

Software

• The lights are controlled using the PIGPIO C++ library
• Status data is pulled from a pre-existing cloud service called 3D Printer OS
• Data from 3D Printer OS is retrieved within a JSON format from their REST API