Count Your Fans With This Stylish ESP8266 Display

Continuous self-affirmation is a vital component to the modern lifestyle. Of course you know the world loves you, but exactly how much do they love you? Checking your phone every few minutes to see if you’ve gained any followers is gauche, and perhaps more to the point, doesn’t let you show off when you’ve got visitors over. In the modern era, the up-and-coming social media star needs a stylish way to display just how popular they are for the world to see.

That’s the idea behind this very slick social media counter created by [Becky Stern]. Built into a standard shadow box frame and using LED displays glowing through a printed piece of paper, the finished product looks more like modern art than the usual hacker fare.

The counter is powered by a NodeMCU, but you could drop in your favorite variant of the ESP8266 and things would work more or less the same. For the displays, [Becky] is using four Adafruit 7-Segment LED modules, which are easily controlled via I2C which keeps the wiring to a minimum.

It’s interesting to note that since her follower count on Twitter has already hit five digits, two of the display modules are used next to each other for that particular service. Her Instructables and Instagram counters only have one display each however, limiting her counts on those services to 9,999 each. There’s probably something to be learned here in terms of the relative follower counts you can expect on the different social networks if you’re targeting your content to the hacker and maker crowd, but we’ll leave the analysis to those with a better handle on such matters.

Hardware aside, [Becky] spends a lot of time in the video talking about the code she’s come up with to pull her stats from the various services and push them out to the LED displays at a regular interval. It’s nice to see so much attention and explanation given to the software side of a project like this, as more often than not you’re left to your own to figure out what the source code is doing.

This project is quite similar to the YouTube Play Button hack we covered a few months back, but the addition of multiple social networks in one device is a nice improvement over the basic concept.

15 thoughts on “Count Your Fans With This Stylish ESP8266 Display

  1. I’d rather use an ESP8266 to control my fans. The ones on the ceiling in every room. Some sort of smart velocity control based on temperature, humidity, and external airflow as there is no point running the fan if there is a nice breeze coming in the windows.

  2. >Continuous self-affirmation is a vital component to the modern lifestyle. Of course you know the world loves you, but exactly how much do they love you?

    Sometimes that’s a very easy question; I could make this project with one LED and no integrated circuits!

  3. Nice hack! Too dificult for me though.
    Does anybody know andogital counter to display on your smartphone/tablet that worksbfor Facebook. Tried Like box counter pro but when Intype in my facebook page ID, it does not work. Tried several formats (vomplete url, only id cide, with slashes, without etc. Etc.
    Otherwise also willing tobpay something for somebody who can peke one for me.
    Should be linked ti py dj Page.

    https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1709490489138799&ref=content_filter

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