How to Run the Distance to the Moon with Strava Data and a Pico W Board -- Episode 611

Looking at edge lighting for the rungs, it appears that you can now get acrylic that is specifically designed to be edge lit:

https://www.perspex.co.uk/materials/perspex-cast-acrylic/edge/

It also appears that you can now get acrylic that is "...specially designed to be routered out and LEDs embedded inside...":

https://www.perspex.co.uk/materials/perspex-cast-acrylic/spectrum-led/

You can also now appear to get acrylic that appears black in daylight but will still transmit LED light: 

https://www.perspex.co.uk/materials/perspex-cast-acrylic/secret-sign/

Armed with a laser cutter it should be possible to come up with some pretty illuminating results using that lot.

While still down today's rabbit hole, I stumbled across this old Agilent application brief on "Light Guide Techniques Using LED Lamps" which some members may find of some interest.

https://megaled.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf-for-edge-lighting-light-guides.pdf

I'm guessing that a resin 3D printer along with some optical grade epoxy could produce some nice light pipe designs, to help edge-light laser-cut acrylic projects.

You could also pull in the orbit data to run an animation when the space station is overhead. This could turn it into a more generic project where it can display information / generate a reward by unlocking the lid etc. for anything with a suitable API.

Genius Dave!

Perhaps connect Strava to the cookie jar as an interlock mechanism.

"next cookie unlocked in 4.5km..." 

"...run 9.5km for bonus cookie"

Maybe you can count hours spent on e14 projects as mental fitness miles...

Or I should run more

A variation using some of the Derby game features might be to have a 'space elevator' that carries some sort of display so that you get the cumulative distance shown by elevator position and then a percentage breakdown plus other info shown on the display.

As would sending your siblings to the moon perhaps...

Removing a few rungs usually slows people down a bit

Looking good.

I'm sure there is an in-joke in there somewhere about someone in the Computing Dept running to ISS 

For motivational purposes, if you're a 'couch to 5k' runner, you could perhaps use one stile (side rail) to indicate smaller 500m increments and the other stile to indicate 15km increments. Otherwise they don't get to see much LED activity day-to day.