Meeple Traffic Light

American pedestrian traffic lights show a little walking figure when it’s safe to cross, and a raised hand when it’s not. I always liked that look, so I built a tiny shelf-sized version of it, except that the walking figure is a meeple. A meeple is the wooden game piece you’ll find in many board games, most popular in Carcassonne.

The build

The case is 3D-printed and sandwiches a 64×64 P2.5 LED matrix behind a sheet of frosted acrylic, which diffuses the individual LEDs. It’s made up of a front section, a back panel, a shield, and a plug housing, held together with M3 heated inserts and counter-sunk screws. I printed mine in terracotta and matte black PLA at 0.2 mm layer height, no supports needed.

If you want to print your own, I uploaded the model with full assembly instructions and the bill of materials to Printables.

The software

Inside, an Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 drives the matrix through ESPHome. By default it just alternates between a “walk” and a “stop” image, each shown for a configurable duration. Both the timings and the brightness are exposed to Home Assistant, so you can tweak them without reflashing anything.

I put together a stripped-down example configuration and shared it as a gist, in case you want to build something similar with your own images. You can find the images I used on Printables as well.

See it in action

Quotes page

My display doesn’t just cycle between walking and standing, the third phase shows a German aphorism instead, like “Die Augen sprechen, was die Hand verschweigt.” (“The eyes speak what the hand conceals.”).

Those quotes aren’t hand-picked, I generate them by combining short, thematically related sentences into new ones. It’s a fun little side project of its own, but not really what this post is about, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Closing thoughts

It’s a small build, but it’s been a nice addition to my board game shelf. If you want to build one yourself, head over to Printables for the files and instructions.