Raspberry Pi Order-Status LED Display

At Bacon & Company, the print team was constantly asking “what’s the status of this order?” — Ready to Print, Waiting on POs, Reserved. That info lived in a web system nobody on the shop floor had open.

The idea

Put the answer on the wall. I built a Raspberry Pi system that:

1. Polls the order-management system’s web API on a schedule
2. Maps each order status to a color
3. Drives a custom-soldered LED light strip so the whole floor can see order states at a glance

What I learned

• Working with REST APIs and parsing JSON responses on a schedule
• Soldering and wiring an addressable LED strip to the Pi’s GPIO
• Making it survive reboots and network hiccups (systemd service + retry logic)

The result

The team stopped interrupting each other to check statuses — the wall just tells you. It streamlined the whole order workflow and was a great excuse to combine networking, code, and hardware.