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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?
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
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"!
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.
It wasn't obvious to me how to get that LED talking USB over that microcontroller.
That said, £15 does seem a lot, when far more capable Arduino kits are selling at Maplin for not much more. But probably reasonable if they're amortizing their costs over only a few units.
All of the *lock keys are mostly useless. Plenty of people (myself included) have remapped our Caps Lock key to TAB. The number of times I've wanted Caps Lock has greatly outweighed the number of times I've sit hitting it 1-2-3 times making sure it's not toggled wrong. Ditto for Scroll Lock. The number of times I've wanted it on versus the number of times I've said, "Hey, why isn't that scrolling right?!?"
Using those keyboard lights for notifications is OLD NEWS. We've been doing it forever... ...for about £15 less than the £15 in the slashvertisement.
Heck, just popup a dialog box from a program and skip all this USB to LED flashy stuff. Shesh..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
OR.. Brace yourself.... Write a program that pops a dialog box... You can do it for free, no hardware, soldering irons or USB port required.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This.
I've been using the keyboard LEDs for notifications since the DOS days. Nowadays some people even have an actual screen built into their keyboards. You could also use your second display, phone or tablet for notifications and failing all of that, just have a small pop-up/toast appear in a corner of the screen or on the task bar/system tray.
This project is stupid. Nobody is going to want to put together some big ass (it is HUGE for what little it does), ugly circuit board and waste a perfectly good USB port.
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
Oh, it's a 10(british-pound) indicator LED.
..,. made from less than 5 PetroDollars worth of parts.
Butbutbut... HID firmware on an AtTiny85!
Yea, not impressed. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
We get it. You think it's a better idea to do this with software. That's fine and there are no shortage of such programs.
But what about when I'm playing a game in full screen? (as mentioned in the article). What if the monitor's gone to sleep? What if I'm listening to music with the monitor off?
Just because there's another way to do this doesn't mean this do-hickey isn't useful.
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.
A) Posting as AC only hides you from other users
B) Our friends at dice.com surely record the IP address from which every post was made
C) Probably banned anyway
D) You're 100% correct, otherwise.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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)
Many keyboards don't have LEDs any more because they are wireless. LEDs would quickly kill the batteries. I know many here prefer a wired Model M but it's nice to be able to just move the keyboard out of the way sometimes, and my arthritic fingers prefer low impact low travel MS/Lenovo keyboards.
Scroll Lock is useful for breaking out of VMs. The Num Lock key pisses me off because I never, ever want the numeric keyboard not to be numeric.
My boss hates caps lock so much he immediately rips it off every keyboard he gets. I think I might start doing the same thing with Num Lock. I wish they made keyboards with an underscore key.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Is this a Windoze problem?
Macs already have this functionality built in to notifications.
"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."
My email reader and other apps have a trillion ways to get my attention without me soldering a hardware msgbox().
In that case, I suggest a used second keyboard, for about $2, complete with LEDs taped to the top of your monitor. :)
Cheaper solution: get an USB stick with a LED, write an app which would read files from your memory stick on trigger, enjoy a cheaper AND more useful device which does the same thing.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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
They are connected in series so you cannot control individual ones.
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.
The attention span of hackers these days is so short that they make something extremely simple (and completely unimaginative) like this and productize it already. Just like the punch yourself in the face game. Sad.
Many keyboards don't have LEDs any more because they are wireless.
That could be solved mechanically. For each LED, have instead a tiny window behind which you put some flap which is other side red, other side black. Then you just flip this flap when the state of the lock is changed.
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 .
For each LED, have instead a tiny window behind which you put some flap which is other side red, other side black.
I work exclusively in blue light, you insensitive clod!
Adding moving parts to what was previously an entirely solid-state device running on batteries. What could possibly go wrong?
High contrast e-paper, on the other hand...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Considering how small Bluetooth adapters can be, this is a little on the chunky side.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That's why they made soundcards
There are myriad sensible reasons why one might not want their soundcard on.
and also the system tray can hold notifications.
Besides the obvious situation of when your monitor is off, did you even read what you quoted?
or to tell you that you have a message from one app while another is at full-screen
The systray is no good in that situation, is it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now that your screen is dominated by huge "apps", I guess you need someplace for notifications ...
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.
I'm actually surprised a bit that wireless keyboards don't include a small LCD that indicates the status of the lock keys, since that would require almost no power. You still wouldn't be able to see it in the dark (though if I was to get fancy I would put a backlight in that toggles for a few seconds when one of the lock keys is pushed). Then again, few people I know use a wireless keyboard on a regular desktop set up anyway, as it's generally just an inconvenience.