David Huerta shared a project he posted on the NYC Resistor blog: Emma-Ohnoes – Sculpture of Buddhist King and Judge of Hell as a Data Center Indicator of a Network Apocalypse:
Every now and then, a particularly hard storm hits an undisclosed datacenter in Virginia where a huge chunk of The Cloud faces off with actual clouds to see which one can keep electricity running through it the longest. Sometimes the data center loses, causing DevOps teams and assorted other developers to get calls and tweets from literally everyone telling them their site is down.
Usually this sort of apocalypse is indicated with a tiny icon on a web dashboard, visible only to the people already panicking and frantically reading up on High Availability and Multi-AZ Deployments. A little red icon doesn’t quite convey the gravity of the sky falling, so I figured the best indicator of cloud infrastructure status would be the Buddhist king and judge of hell, Emma-O (aka Enma-O aka Yama). I happened to have a scan of an Emma-O wood sculpture from a previous project at the museum I work at (btw we’re hiring), so I scaled it up a bit and printed a copy in transparent blue-ish PLA….
Blue Emma: All’s well in the world.
Red Emma: The cloud is stormy tonight.
…If you enjoy using Muromachi-era Buddhist art to let the office know the site’s down, the 3D models for Emma-O, the also-3D-printed base, schematics, and Arduino sketch are freely available online. The Arduino sketch is designed so that any URL you want to set targetUrl to only needs to return anything other than 200 OK in the HTTP response header, so it can also be pointed to the URL of a site directly to see if it’s up or not…
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the MakerBot Digitizer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!