The rapid development of COVID-19 into a full-blown global pandemic has generated the need for regular updates regarding the status of this crisis. People want to be informed about the number of infections, deaths and recoveries in their countries. The maker community has responded to this need by creating a number of monitors for this purpose. In this article, we present a few such monitors which have been based on Espressif SoCs.

1. Display for Live Updates on COVID-19 Cases

Alan Wang, a maker from Taiwan, has created a gadget that helps you get your country’s coronavirus updates, using MAX7219 LED modules, along with the ESP8266-based D1 mini development board and MicroPython.

Alan discovered that there’s a useful API called COVID API, which can be queried on MicroPython devices. The following URL https://coronavirus-19-api.herokuapp.com/countries/{countryName} can be used for querying data regarding a specific country. Users can simply plugin Alan’s device and quickly get the latest numbers about COVID-19 in their country. And maybe some of you can use this gadget to remind other people how dangerous COVID-19 actually is.

To get all the details about Alan Wang’s project, click here.

2. COVID-19 Real-time Tracker

This project is very similar to the previous one. Indian engineer Saswat Samal published it on 25th March 2020, when COVID19 was still spreading rapidly across the globe, but -as Saswat Samal put it- “most of the Indian people were unaware of it”. Saswat created this project in the hope that it would help his fellow citizens to become more aware of the dangers that COVID-19 poses to human health. The COVID-19 Real-time Track consists of:

• one NodeMCU ESP8266 Breakout Board
• one ElectroPeak 0.96" OLED 64x128 Display Module
• and Female/Female Jumper Wires

The COVID-19 Real-time Track gives users constantly fresh statistics, as it is completely based on real-time data from the Indian Ministry of Family Welfare and Health.

For all the details about this project, click here.

3. Corona Lamp

According to Dimitris Platis, a Greek engineer and maker, his project, which he calls Corona Lamp, “can be utilized to quickly monitor the progress of a country’s efforts to halt COVID-19, without looking as threatening as graphs”. 

The Corona Lamp illuminates according to the growth rate of the COVID-19 infections in the selected country, over the past 2 weeks. The basic principle is actually quite simple: the more red the lamp gets, the higher the infection rate has become. When it gets greener, it means that the growth rate of the disease is low or has even stopped. There are 16 LEDs on the lamp, each illuminated for the disease’s growth rate on a particular day. The data are fetched wirelessly via an ESP8266 microcontroller and their original source is the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

To get all the details about the Corona Lamp, click here.