We live in an era where technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate, and those advancements are making extraordinarily powerful computing and communications hardware available to virtually everyone.
Some forward-looking individuals see this as an opportunity to innovate and build electronic devices to improve peoples’ lives. Numerous demonstrations have proven that these systems can help the blind to navigate around town, enable those with motor impairments to interact efficiently with computers, and much more.
Other brave souls simply build for the sake of building. They dare to push the limits of technology to make nonsensical projects with no practical purpose. They make the world more fun.
Guy Dupont is the latter sort of builder. His latest invention, the Bumpin’ Sticker, exists because it can. Guy had an idea that made him smile and he decided to build to to spread the joy.
A Particle Boron made it easy to access the internet from anywhere.
Guy had a pet peeve about bumper stickers: they lie. He would often see bumper stickers that say “Keep honking! I’m listening to,” an oddly specific song (Linger by the Cranberries or Taylor Swift deep cuts are popular ones on these stickers). That is just impractical. Few people listen to the same song over and over on the drive. Those who do are usually toddlers and do not pick out the bumper stickers (otherwise we’d see a lot more Moana listed on the bumper stickers). Guy liked the idea of these bumper stickers and wanted to share his music taste with the masses, so he got to work.
His solution was to create an electronic “sticker” that can be updated in real-time to reflect what the owner of the vehicle is actually listening to. This may be a lighthearted project, but there were some big problems that had to be solved to make it happen.
The centerpiece of the build is an 11.3-inch, 440 x 1920 pixel HDMI display. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer is used to drive the screen, and a Particle Boron development board was included for internet access on the go via cellular networks. The components were hot glued together before being encased in heat-shrink wrap as a makeshift weatherproofing solution. A window was cut into the heat-shrink wrap to expose the screen, and powerful magnets were used to keep the device in place on the back of the vehicle (so far).
An external web service was used to scrape Dupont’s public Last.fm profile to find out what music he was currently listening to. That code was simple enough to write, but in order to access the service, a reliable internet connection was required. On the road that can be a tall order, but by using a Particle Boron development board, accessing cellular networks was a breeze. With a free global embedded SIM card and data plan included, one does not need to have a contract with a major carrier or worry about paying for their data use.
The Boron also takes advantage of the open-source feather form factor, which makes prototyping and integration with other devices quite simple. In this case, Dupont transmitted the information about the music he was playing to the Raspberry Pi wirelessly via Bluetooth. The Raspberry Pi then created an appropriate PNG image file to serve as the “sticker” before displaying it on the screen.
So far the Bumpin’ Sticker is working just as Dupont had hoped. While the hardware is rock-solid, the weatherproofing and magnet attachment may not be. But until it falls off or suffers irreparable water damage, Dupont plans to broadcast his musical preferences to everyone else on the road to give us something to smile about on our daily commutes.
