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.

Comments

Design

[benjfowler]

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).

Re:Design

[viperidaenz]

You don't need any microcontroller to do this.
Attach an FTDI FT232 chip to the USB port and although its designed an a USB to UART chip it can be configured for GPIO.

Re:Design

[Hal_Porter]

Actually if you fig a bit deeper there is something interesting about this project. Look at the USB stack - it's all done in software using GPIO pins! Very clever. There's a company that wrote the USB stack. You can get it GPL licensed for free or you can pay for a BSD license, but they start real cheap

http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html

They've got a load of projects too

http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/prjobdev.html

If you go above 10,000 units you probably pay more but by that point you can afford it.

Very interesting mix of clever code and a well thought out business model I think.

DevCon.exe and a red-glowing USB mouse

[GrangerX]

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.

Re:Classic science fiction

[istartedi]

That's my thought. If I've got time and money to burn, and I'm going to fire up the soldering iron, I want a wall full of blinking lights that signify... ummm... that the FUTURE has arrived. Yes, see? That green one there? It means we're in the future. The red one? When it starts blinking, you're time is running out...

It's funny that this should come up because just now I was in a fast food Chinese place by myself. I was watching people, and there were these two middle-school aged kids with smart phone splaying games or something. I was thinking, these kids have never known a time when tiny little computers were not everywhere. When I was a kid, we thought a home computer would be a wall full of blinking lights.