I was inspired by the Play Button awards YouTube sends out for subscriber milestones and whipped up a simple circuit using an ESP8266 wifi board and seven segment display to show off my realtime subscriber count. This is a great IoT beginner project, with just a little soldering and a code personalization required to make it work for your own account. I made a version 2 that supports more than 10K subscribers, too.
Before attempting this project, you should be generally familiar with uploading new programs to your Arduino board and installing code libraries, both of which you can learn for free in my Arduino Class, though you really don’t have to understand any of the actual Arduino code to get this project running.
For this project, you will need the following materials:
- Small shadow box
- Printer and paper
- Scissors
- Cutting mat or scrap cardboard
- Illustration board or more scrap cardboard
- Utility/craft knife
- Metal ruler (optional)
- Tape
- Glue stick
- Feather Huzzah ESP8266 with female headers
- 4-digit 7-segment FeatherWing display
- Micro USB cable (charge + sync, not charge-only)
- USB power adapter (optional)
and the following tools:
- Soldering iron and solder
- Flush diagonal cutters
- Desoldering braid or solder sucker (for mistakes)
Required software libraries:
Unique data required:
- Google API key
- YouTube channel ID
- Wifi network name/password
As an alternative to the Feather Huzzah, you can also use your favorite ESP8266 microcontroller board, some of which require an FTDI cable to upload new programs. Use the standard 7-segment backpack rather than the FeatherWing version.
Read more: YouTube Subscriber Counter With ESP8266
