Lit up coffee table

Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute

One of the simple pleasures of life is enjoying a drive to work… only to get stuck in traffic that you could’ve known about if you just checked before your daily commute. Who are we kidding? There’s almost nothing worse. [Michael Rechtin] saw this as a great opportunity to spruce up his living room with something practical, a coffee table that serves as a traffic map of Cincinnati.

The table itself is fairly standard with mitered joints at the corners and coated in polyurethane. Bolt on a few legs, and you’ve got a coffee table. But the fun comes with the fancy design on top. A CNC-cut map of Cincinnati is laid out under a sheet of glass. Roads and rivers are painted for a nice touch.

Of course, none of the woodcraft is what gets the attention. This is where the LED light show comes in. On top of the map resides an animated display of either road conditions or the other five pre-programmed animations. The animations include color-coded highways or the good ole’ gamer RGB. To control all of the topographic goodness, a Raspberry Pi is included with some power regulation underneath the table. Every minute, the Pi is able to grab live traffic data from the cloud to display on top.

A looker, this project shows how our hacking fun can be integrated directly into our everyday life in more subtle ways. When we want to decorate ourselves, however, we might want to turn to more personal fare. Check out this miniature liquid simulation pendant for some more everyday design.

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Laser Cutting Bathymetric Maps

Bathymetry is the underwater equivalent to topography. And with the right map data, you can make some amazing 3D laser cut maps that feature both land masses — and the details under the sea. [Logan] just learned how to do this, and is sharing his knowledge with us.

[Logan] holds the typical hacker belief: The best way to learn something is just to start the project and figure it out as you go. Which also makes him an excellent candidate for helping others to learn what not to do. His goal of the project was to create a visually stunning map of Vancouver that helps to emphasize the depth of the ocean just off the coast.

To do this he obtained bathymetry data from the Fisheries and Oceans of Canada, and city map data from Open Street Map, a service we’re very familiar with that has provided data for many cool hacks, like this Runner’s GPS unit. The tricky part now is combining the data in order to laser it.

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