A Map of the East Bay Where the Roads Are Copper and the Dots Are Family

Jonathan, a Bay Area maker who blogs at Robopenguins, has built a PCB designed as a literal map of the California East Bay. Roads are top-side copper traces. Land is solder mask. Behind the board, a 64x32 RGB LED matrix lights up dots wherever his family members happen to be. Hackaday wrote it up on May 23.

The map was traced from Snazzy Maps and hand-routed in PCB design software, which means every freeway, surface street, and shoreline in the East Bay had to be drawn as an electrical conductor. Behind the board, an ESP32 pulls location data over MQTT from Google's opt-in family sharing feature, then drives the matrix to glow softly through the gaps in the copper. The thing hangs on the wall like a small framed artwork. No app, no notification, no screen of any kind. A quiet object that knows where the people he loves are right now.

The most interesting part comes from Jonathan in the Hackaday comments. "We've largely normalized being tracked digitally, but there's something more visceral about seeing that tracking represented physically in the real world instead of abstractly existing on a server somewhere." Maybe that is the whole prompt for the next decade of object design. What changes when our digital exhaust becomes furniture? When the data we would rather not think about becomes something we have to look at every morning?