High Tech YouTube Play Button

As our YouTube channel began to creep closer and closer to the 1,000 subscriber milestone, we began to ask ourselves why we too couldn’t have our own YouTube play button.  No victories are too big or small in our eyes and each one is worth celebrating…so why not celebrate this one?

So in true RumbleLab fashion, we decided to make one! Because that is what we do, make stuff. But the thing is, we didn’t want to just build another play button in a new material or color to make it “unique”. We wanted ours to be special in that it would truly capture how we feel each time we get a new subscriber. Seeing someone subscribe or write a positive comment on a video is the best feeling and is what encourages us to continue creating. For that reason, we came up with the idea to create a play button that lights up and cheers each time someone new subscribes to our channel.

This project required us to step outside of our comfort zone and into unknown territory as it uses microcontrollers in a way we haven’t previously explored. We were going to need to make it talk to the internet. Making things though, is a lot like climbing mountains. If you just take it one step at a time or use a guide from someone who has already made the climb, you will eventually arrive at your destination.

While it was a tougher build from a learning perspective, the overall project didn’t require too many steps in the end. We modeled the play button and got that printing on our 3D printer. Next, we sorted out how to connect our microcontroller to YouTube’s API. Then we created a program that would check every minute to see if our channel’s subscriber count had increased. If the program finds that our channel’s sub count has gone up, it will light up and make a cheering noise. From there, we uploaded the program to the microcontroller, hooked up the wiring for the speakers & LED lights and voila, our very own YouTube play button! You can see more about it in our YouTube video below.

Not going to lie, it’s impossible to not smile and do a little dance each time the play button goes off. If you haven’t subscribed yet, we would love for you to join us. If you have subscribed but would like to set the play button off, unsubscribe, wait 60 seconds and resubscribe (don’t forget this step, when you unsubscribe YouTube tries it’s hardest to never show you another one of our videos). I can’t believe we’re telling you to unsubscribe! XD

This may just be our favorite project to date. None of this would be possible though, without the support of each and every one of you that subscribed and helped us reach our 1,000 sub goal. We are incredibly thankful for all of you and cheers to 1,000 more!

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