This Animal Skull's Glowing Eyes Indicate Internet Status
Emily Velasco built this internet status indicator in the form of an animal skull with glowing eyes.
Few things are more frustrating than internet outages. Everything operates via the internet these days, so you end up being unable to do anything — heck, you may not even be able to listen to music. So if you're anything like us, you end up refreshing your browser every 10 seconds to find out when the internet is back. Emily Velasco's internet connection goes down a lot and she found herself in that browser-refreshing cycle often. For the sake of her sanity, she built this internet status indicator in the form of an animal skull with glowing eyes.
Knowing Velasco, we feel confident in saying that this is a real skull—maybe from a cat or raccoon. Velasco's design aesthetic tends to match what you'd see in the coolest "curiosities" shop in your city, so her home is full of skulls and this fits right in. The device contains that skull housed within a transparent dome enclosure. LEDs fill the skull's eye sockets and glow in either red or green. Red indicates that the internet is down and green indicates that it's working at the moment. Velasco no longer needs to refresh her browser — she can just glance over at this device to see if the internet is up.
On the electronics side, this is quite affordable and easy to build. Inside the enclosure, which is a repurposed security camera housing, is an Arduino Nano 33 IoT development board. That has a built-in Wi-Fi adapter, which is all it needs to check the status of the internet. It stays connected to the local Wi-Fi network and attempts to ping google.com at preset intervals. If the ping is a success, that means the internet is working and the Arduino sets the LEDs to green. If the ping fails to receive a response, then either the internet or Google's servers are down. Since the latter is very unlikely, the Arduino assumes that the internet is down and sets the LEDs to red.
Velasco's eccentric design tastes may not appeal to everyone, but anyone can take her code and the electronic design and put it into an enclosure that suits their tastes.