TraveLED | Devpost

Inspiration

Many people love to travel and many of them use world maps and pins or scratch maps to track where they have been to. We created a solution that is more flexible, easier to personalize and way cooler than existing solutions.

What it does

It is a map that has a basic LED color and you can illuminate countries and regions in allocated colors to distinguish where you have already been and where you want to go in the future

How I built it

We use pieces of woods, paper, tons of LEDs, connectors and power cables for the backend. Engraved glass is used for the front end.

Challenges I ran into

Our maximum size was limited by the capacity of laser cutters and the number of LEDs was limited. Also allocating the LEDs to the map in an optimal way to have a good resolution was difficult. Soldering the LEDs took our computer scientist a sleepless night.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We build an illuminating map. How awesome is that. Additionally, working in a cross-disciplinary team, managing to work on something that no one of us had a lot of prior experience and shipping it in time!

What I learned

Worked together in cross disciplianry teams, had gread ideas, tons of fun and learned a lot about how to build stuff and get things done.

What's next for TraveLED

It's gonna be a hockeystick!

There are many possibilities for upgrades. Since it can easily be integrated in a mobile phone application, the map could be connected to different data sets (such as your google travel history) which would allow a connection from "time spend in place x" or "when was the last time you visited place x" to "brightness of LED" "blinkin LED", etc.

You could also connect it to friends, e.g. via Facebook or Couchsurfing and show locations where friends welcome guests in the next 3 months. This would allow better planning for visits.

Another option would be showing different colours for different family members & friends. E.g. to show who is where at the moment.