I live in Santa Cruz and I work in Los Gatos, which means twice a day during the work week I get to drive on Highway 17. In the Bay Area, everybody knows Highway 17's reputation, but for the uninitiated, the narrow lanes and tight curves going over Patchen Pass have earned the highway nicknames like "Killer 17" and "Blood Alley". In addition, all the rain that California has been getting this year has resulted in multiple mudslides that closed the highway completely. Traffic on Highway 17 is unpredictable.

To give myself a leg up, I designed, programmed, and built a clock for my desk that changes color based on traffic conditions. Throughout the day, the clock queries Google's Distance Matrix API for the commute duration and adjusts an array of RGB LEDs to reflect the road condition. Normally the clock displays the time, but if the button on top is pressed, the display shows the duration in traffic.

Color coding

The color scale is similar to a weather map where green is good and violet is bad... 63 minutes to get home is a bad day.

The system is built on the Feather Huzzah with ESP8266 by Adafruit. The ESP8266 is a great low-cost wifi radio and Adafruit's Feather lineup makes adding breakout boards very straight forward. For this project, I used the Feather Huzzah, the Neopixel Feather Wing, the FeatherWing Doubler, and a 4-digit display. I 3D printed a translucent housing for the electronics that allows the changes in color to show through.

What's Inside

Here is a basic diagram of the guts. The nice thing about the Feather PCBs is they stack, so the wiring is not as bad as it looks.

In January and February, when Highway 17 was closed 5 times due to mudslides (and one time for a manhunt), I was glad to have my traffic clock.