Slashdot Mirror
Add USB LED Notifications To Your PC With Just a Bit of Soldering (Video)
Arvydas Juskevicius (say that five times fast) is an independent software developer and hardware hacker based in London (which is where I got a chance to talk with him) who's decided to bring the useful LED signalling capabilities of many modern smartphones into the world of desktop or laptop computers. With his £10 BlinkStick kit (£15 pre-assembled), you get a programmable multi-color LED that's about the size of a flash memory key. Deceptively simple -- it's essentially one giant pixel, after all, which might not sound exciting when you have millions of them on a dense display surface. But that LED light is something you can use as a signal for alarms, or to tell you that you have a message from one app while another is at full-screen, or practically anything else that you can devise software to notice and react to. I get the sense that Juskevicius would prefer that people get the kit version, to help spur interest in actually soldering some hardware rather than just plugging it in. If you're allergic to paying in other than U.S. dollars, the BlinkStick is also available from Adafruit Industries. Watch the video below to see it in action.
I said his name five times fast, nothing happened. Should I do it in front of a mirror?
It's already there, too bad there's probably no way to control it without turning off the monitor.
Nice work, dice holdings, you are continuously degrading /.
More fun to grab an Arduino and a small alphanumeric LCD to read out statuses to you, I say. :P
... the LEDs on your keyboard?
Impressively tiny device. Had no idea that it was possible to build a device that interfaces to USB in so few components (it does USB in software on a tiny microcontroller, and the firmware is around 1kb in size...)
The instructions look easier than falling off a log.
Question for anybody who knows: would it be possible to generalize this design to drive an array, of -- say -- 10 or 20 RGB LEDs ? This would be a lot more useful for me, as then, I could rig my server case with a string of LEDs to tell the status of all my hard drives, network, load (amongst other things).
I've got an iMac... and to add insult to injury, Growl got installed somehow.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Or any computer that was built up to the year 2000?
FFS, people...
I can definitely see how this advertisement, that a good deal of the population here can make on their own or with a little reading, deserves the front page.
Getting a microcontroller to blink is the digital hardware equivalent of hello world. This is painfully stupid and I hope people don't buy into it. It's one thing to sell a kit and have an informational DIY blog, it's another to market this shit as an actual product.
Blink(1)
I'm all for people building things, but if you just want a polished notification LED for your computer, go to the original creators.
You can use Autohotkey to turn these lights in to something more useful. In fact, may as well throw capslock in there as well if you don't use it.
Setting the toggle keys states
Now you just need to build the rest of the damn script.
Good luck with that.
There was a script somewhere that did this, but I cannot find it.
There are some interesting ideas from this thread as well actually.
Setting LED states
Also still an active thread which I just saw there on the last page, so all good there.
As you said, it "might not sound exciting when you have millions of them on a dense display surface".
That's because I can have all my notifications on that one. Right in my FOV.
would it be possible to generalize this design to drive an array, of -- say -- 10 or 20 RGB LEDs ?
Sure. Addressable LED strings are cheap, and widely used for annoying blinking holiday decorations. If you don't want to solder, here's an assembled USB light string controller.
Oh, it's a 10(british-pound) indicator LED. Oh look I can use it to get notifications from programs that already notify me! How useful! NOT!
Next up, a circuit to ring a bell when someone calls your phone.
Spin around three times, widdershin, while standing in front of the mirror. It may help if there happens to be a Satanic mass in progress - or not. YMMV
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Arr-VEE-dus You-SKAY-vee-chews. Not that difficult to repeat five times in a row even after a 10% Belgian quadrupel. What's the prize?
So someone does something a bit cool and the first thing Slashdot can do is take the piss of his his foreign name.
... which is something like http://www.ck3.co.uk/minimus-32-avr-atmel-atmega32u2-usb-dev-board.html, which does USB in hardware, has 2 LEDs already on board and only costs £6.00, or as little as £3.50 if you buy in bulk. Plus you can emulate pretty much any USB device you want - I've used one to drive a whole set of RGB LEDs by mimicking a MIDI output device and mapping notes to colours.
£15 quid for a single LED driven by an inappropriate microcontroller? About the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.
I've been looking at the "Firehose" submissions page every day and have been voting and have seen which stories there are the most popular and yet less than 1% of those stories are ever posted on /. This story, for example, was not in the queue. Most of the stories posted by samzenpus are not from the queue either even though they sometimes say they're from "Anonymous Coward". Don't let that fool you, that AC is him.
This story, for example, is pure advertisement. It has zero value to our community from the news standpoint. There's over half a dozen more worthy stories in the queue.
Degradation in quality of /.'s front page is truly troubling. When you compare it to reddit or HN or techmeme, you really see how shitty it is. And the saddest part is that it would be 10x better if editors actually started posting top stories from the queue.
I'm posting as AC because the last time I bitched about timothy's stories, my IP got banned.
I made a top-of-the-cubicle LED indicator using Devcon.exe and a Microsoft Mouse that happened to glow red when it was receiving USB power once.
I basically had devcon.exe 'enable' the mouse when it was ready to indicate something and 'disable' it otherwise.
Worked reasonably well, but that was back before I got all the notifications on the smartphone anyway.
There was a kickstarter, blink(1) a little over a year ago that did the same thing - http://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2013-01-01/759517#759517 (and in a nicer package).
I wanted something similar (visual cues for meeting reminders; my "email" system is on a KVM with other "dev" systems). I ended up getting the Dream Cheeky 815 USB Webmail Notifier (http://www.dreamcheeky.com/webmail-notifier) - the thing is designed for email notifications with webmail, but there's an Apache License 2.0 driver and helper app (http://dreamcheekyusb.codeplex.com/), which worked fine to drive the thing - the little command line app that uses the driver had enough functionality (gradual on, color change, and blink) that I didn't need to write any real code.
A little macro scripting, and it was working fine with Outlook.
A little bigger that the other solutions, so maybe not great for a rack (though it's probably about 1U so it would work fine), but works nice sitting on my desk under my displays . . .
How about something similar that perhaps goes into the headphones jack of a cell phone to add LED notification to THAT?
Blackberry got it right and while a smattering of other phones include notification LEDs, it's very rare. If such a device could be powered through the headphone jack (no idea if there's enough current... IANAEE) and a little helper application for Android/iOS was written, I'd spend big bucks for such an add-on.
"Oh no... he found the
Modern connection interfaces are complex enough that you need an IC to negotiate a connection before you can even get a LED blinking. Today's systems aren't exactly designed for hobbyists to build things.
Get an old beige box. You can solder a resistor and LED to the DTR pin of a serial port, and program it with a couple lines of assembly -- Oop, nope. The modern OSs aren't really designed for hobbyists to build things either. You'll be learning how to write a kernel driver for your OS if you use Linux. This is why I still use and make small DOS-esque OSs -- It's quite easy using BIOS interrupts. Also, you can still install DOS on nearly all x86-64 systems...
Data Terminal Ready is just one pin, but with it and the RxD / TxD pins you can build a simple lock-step electronic coms project on a serial port -- So you don't have to implement the whole RS232 chipset just to do a little manual IO. Parallel ports have many more such pins to play with, and don't require serialization either. That's why I teach kids to make robotics with DOS like OSs on my spare "junk" -- Because it's so much faster, cheaper, and easier than with USB, or even RS232 serializing and deserializing state -- Save that for when they get a bit more skilled. There's something almost magical to watching bits flip in memory by making and breaking electrical contacts; Folks immediately start thinking up ways to use such a thing. It's fun watching the scales fall from their eyes as kids realize computers aren't impenetrable black boxes full of voodoo. It's kind of funny that you have to buy a kit with ICs to make more transparent the interface provided by making and breaking pins on older hardware.
In my experience, once you get past a couple of LEDs or controlling higher voltage switches via contactors, etc. the next stop usually isn't a notification app for your system -- It's a breadboard full of gizmos, or using your PC to control your other gadgets.
Eg: Readers who liked TFA also liked LIRC.
(swap the LED with IR-LED, and control your home theater setup)
Is this a Windoze problem?
Macs already have this functionality built in to notifications.
When watching science fiction made a few decades ago, one thing that bothered me was that the technology had a lot of fancy LEDs/bulbs that flashed but apparently did nothing else.
See any console on the original Star Trek, or Al's handheld during the first season of Quantum Leap.
But now it makes total sense. They were notification LEDs! Notifying about EVERYTHING!
I've used inexpensive USB email notification devices for applications like this. They're cheap, have a bright RGB LED inside, and the protocol has been reverse-engineered already. Here's a $8 device with free shipping that includes both a controllable LED and a USB hub. That's tough to beat for the money.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4-Port-HUB-USB2-0-Webmail-E-mail-Notifier-for-PC-Laptop-/360683701882?pt=US_USB_Cables_Hubs_Adapters&hash=item53fa6c867a
These are easy to setup under Linux to indicate whatever you want, or even on OpenWrt to indicate WAN down or .
In this case it's an Atmel atTiny85 instead of a PIC chip, and a tri-color RGB LED instead of three separate LEDs, but yeah, it's not all that complex. It also has a printed circuit board, not particularly complex, and yes, you could build it yourself on breadboard. You could also snark about how Arduinos cost ~$30 when they only have
You could also buy a Digispark for ~$9 which has a Tiny85 and a voltage regulator, and breaks out the pins for convenient access, with room for headers so you can build the equivalent of an Arduino shield. Instead of a USB socket, it uses the trick of printing traces on the PCB in a layout that acts as a USB Type A plug, so it's more compact and doesn't need a wire.
Or you could spend ~$8 for an Adafruit Trinket and add an LED; it may be a shade less convenient than the Digispark just because they put the connectors on two sides of the board instead of one (so it's harder to use an RGB LED, but you could put it on the back of the board.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know about you, but the only time I notice the LEDs on my keyboard are when something's wrong (e.g. everything's frozen, and I look at the disk LED to see that it's just the disk busy again), and they're not very bright. This has a brighter RGB LED that gives you a wide range of colours. In practice, no, I wouldn't bother using one of these things on my laptop, because it's physically awkward; might be fun to build something like this for a desktop machine, I suppose. (OTOH, the next desktop machine I'm likely to build would be a Raspberry Pi, which has its own support for this kind of thing, and the LED could be useful because the box itself would be jammed behind the TV.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Thingm has a similar series of products called blink(1). It runs for about $30, but it is not widely available now. They recently finished .
"But that LED light is something you can use as a signal for alarms, or to tell you that you have a message from one app while another is at full-screen"
That's why they made soundcards, and also the system tray can hold notifications.
Considering how small Bluetooth adapters can be, this is a little on the chunky side.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now that your screen is dominated by huge "apps", I guess you need someplace for notifications ...
Might be more expensive comared to the BlinkStick if you buy it new, but if you have a PS Move Motion controller lying around already and don't want to buy additional hardware, the PS Move API (http://thp.io/2010/psmove/) can be used to interface with the controller either via USB or Bluetooth, and apart from a big RGB LED / sphere, it can also rumble, has buttons and motion sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer). You can program it using C/C++, Java, C# or Python (and obviously you can call the C or Python application via a shell script, etc..).
Oh, and you can connect it via Bluetooth as well, so you can take your controller into the living room and have it light up green when your compile / build / test run is finished or whatever.
I can't even get email notifications running in KDE! :(
Somebody hacks this to serve web pages in 3...2...1..
I remember back in the old days, maybe before 1996 or so, hard drives each had their own led header pins. I had 3 or 4 drives in my computer with 3 or 4 hdd led's in my front panel. No real purpose, just liked them, much like these. By the late 90's none of the drives came with them anymore, sad days, just one motherboard driven light for all the drives.
it's already been done. no soldering required
Oddly enough I was doing this 15 years ago with my headless RedHat server. I took apart an old keyboard and just pulled the small board out with the CAPS and NUMLOCK keys and the cable, and chucked the rest. Plugged that in and installed one of several Linux utilities that can fire notifications to keyboard lights and hey presto. And it looked almost identical to this device, only with two LEDs.