Video Add USB LED Notifications To Your PC With Just a Bit of Soldering (Video) 129
Arvydas Juskevicius: BlinkStick is a DIY kit I designed myself and this is something that I just wanted to solve a very simple problem. I want to display an email notification on my computer. We all have this on our phones and tablets but nobody does that I thought well, I just didn’t have something that I could build myself, that I could use it on my computer. So effectively, that’s what it is. And this small device - it is the size of a USB dongle for memory. And you can build it yourself.
Once you build it, then you just plug it into a computer and it just works with Windows, Mac and Linux. It doesn’t need any drivers. It comes with a wide range of API implementations and programing languages like Python, Node.js, Ruby, Dotnet and also Autoit if you have ever heard about that.And so it is also hackable.
So right here, I have it hooked up to an Ikea Dioder and it is controlling the whole LED strip right around this, around my table, (which is for the purpose of demo). In addition to that, it is also being hackable. It also can be linked over to BlinkStick.com where it can be controlled remotely. So you can set the color remotely and it has this very basic API. So this is pretty much it.
Tim:What does it cost?
Arvydas:It is£10.
Tim:And what are some examples of things you might use it for, okay email notifications
Arvydas:So one of them is emails. So there are two things that it can be used. I have heard people using it for various crazy things. So first of all, this is like something that you would do for educational purposes, where you would like to learn a little bit of soldering and it is really easy to solder it, it is just 15 components in it– I designed it that way. So it is like a learning experience.
So you solder it, you hook it up to a computer and then you can use one of the APIs just to control and interface it. Another option is it can also come in pre-soldered so you can just use it to do some email notifications, build process I know companies are using it for notifications about well, from third party telephone systems, about new messages, where they don’t have it normally.There is also a guy who is using it to calibrate a telescope somewhere in the mountains. This was really bizarre for me.There is also
Tim:How do you use it to calibrate a telescope?
Arvydas:To be honest, I know I just have this as a he wrote an email that he is going to be using that and he is doing it in some way so it is probably like pointing it to the light so that it focuses properly, or something like that.
There is also another option. I have also heard that they are using it as a postman detector where a wireless camera that links to Raspberry Pi and links to (it works great with Raspberry Pi), where a wireless camera links to a Raspberry Pi connected to a BlinkStick and whenever there is movement, the webcam notifies Raspberry Pi and lights up BlinkStick that there is somebody at the door.
So there is really a wide variety of ways it is being used. I have been putting a lot of tutorials on the website and there is also a blog where I write about whatever somebody comes up with it. So there is also like a possibility to use it as an Ambilight clone where it glows around the monitor and throws an average color (there is also a video on BlinkStick.com).So that’s pretty much.
Tim:I see several of them hooked into one USB controller and they are running independently, is that right?
Arvydas:Yeah. So all of them are controlled separately and they are all just running through different well animations as they call them, but each of them can be addressed separately, and if you have more of them you can control any of those, so you can one notification for an email, another notification for well, temperature, like it is going to be hot outside so I probably should take a coat, it is going to be hot, outside, so if it bothers you so don’t take a coat, and that could be represented by a red light from BlinkStick that picks the information from a web well, from a web based service.
Name (Score:3, Funny)
I said his name five times fast, nothing happened. Should I do it in front of a mirror?
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Yes, the GP needs to have someone hit him in the head with a stick after saying the name 5 times. And maybe repeat the whole process until he can't say the name 5 times in a row anymore.
Did you spin around? (Score:2)
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
Re: Name (Score:3)
Ar-vee-duhs You-skah-vitch-ee-us. Why not try a hard name like Alison Palin's son?
The name is Lithuanian; Because the first and last name's endings match each other, almost definitely Arvydas was Lithuanian born. Also, that c should be a che, a c with a little carrot over it.
If you want something that is really hard to say, try saying six geese with six goslings: sheshyos zhasheese su sheshiyays zhashy-yukiaise
Re: Name (Score:2)
Whoops. That ess is an esh, too
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Why is this cr@p on the front page? (Score:1)
Nice work, dice holdings, you are continuously degrading /.
Re:Why is this cr@p on the front page? (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking pretty much the same. This is a computer controlled, USB RGB LED (triplet of TLAs!). You can get a Tiva Launchpad from TI preassembled with RGB LED (surprisingly bright BTW) for $13 including shipping. The 15 GBP is about $25 and 10 GBP is $16 in comparison-- I don't know if shipping included in price. Granted the Blinkstick is in a smaller form factor that plugs in directly but the Launchpad has a ARM Cortex processor, GPIO, ADC, UART, USB, etc on it which you can use for other things should you tire of the notification light thing.
Simple Microcontroller Blinky Designs (Score:3)
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
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This is a computer controlled, USB RGB LED (triplet of TLAs!).
Not only that, the PCB seems to be almost entirely PTH instead of SMT - perfect for the DIY market!
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Ooops... not PTH, but THT.
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Hey, my first project with a microprocessor was also to make an LED blink.
This guy is off to a good start!
Arduino (Score:2)
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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 goo
Keyboard has single-color LEDs, not RGB (Score:3)
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 mach
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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With arduino and a shield yes
http://jimmieprodgers.com/kits/lolshield [jimmieprodgers.com]
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/683 [sparkfun.com]
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Did you not see the USB hub that he was using with different notifications?
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I recommend that you link a couple million LEDs, just in case you need more info. But if you do that, the USB port might not be happy, so you should fall back on the displayport one instead, since it's about the same size.
I've got that thing with a big LED or laser for you to plug into the USB in the meantime, you can use it to rest your hand.
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How about just enough to do your own Blinkenlights?
Longer strings (Score:2)
would it be possible to generalize this design to drive an array, of -- say -- 10 or 20 RGB LEDs ?
Sure. Addressable LED strings [adafruit.com] 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. [amazon.com]
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Brian Schmalz has a USB controlled "bit-banging" dev board called the Bit-Whacker. It has 78 IO pins! You can pick one up for $40 at Sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9713).
Or just use the proper thing for the job ... (Score:2, Informative)
... 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
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Yep, the AVRs with hardware USB, like the 32U2, coupled with the lovely open source LUFA usb library, make it painfully easy. I like to make things show up as serial ports.
Though these days I've been using ARM cortex M3 (STM32) with the GPL libopencm3, as the tiny stm32's with hardware USB are cheaper and have more, well, everything. Kind overkill for blinking a couple LEDs, though.
Anyone paying $15 for $2 of parts is a sucker. Seems to be a lot of suckers in the DIY crowd, these days.
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Changing to a micro with more I/O pins would be possible, or better still adding an LED driver chip with shift register so you can have arbitrary length strings.
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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...)
That's the genius of USB really. Most early USB devices probably had a Serial Interface engine in hardware and a few hundred bytes of firmware written in assembler in flash or masked prom.
This device is actually quite high end
http://www.atmel.com/devices/attiny85.aspx [atmel.com]
http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-2586-AVR-8-bit-Microcontroller-ATtiny25-ATtiny45-ATtiny85_Datasheet.pdf [atmel.com]
You've got 8KB of flash. You can program it in C and you get a USB driver.
http://www.blinkstick.com/help/firmware [blinkstick.com]
Looking at the firmware ma
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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 [obdev.at]
They've got a load of projects too
http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/prjobdev.html [obdev.at]
If you go above 10,000 units you probably pay more but by that point you can affo
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How many components? All you need for USB communication is to get the line levels right (mostly through the use of external resistors and diodes), and have a micro-controller capable of talking at speeds fast enough that the computer doesn't think the device dropped off. USB1.1 is very easy to emulate in software on most microcontrollers 12MHz or greater.
Microcontrollers with hardware USB controllers built into them start at around $2 and have the clamping taken care of so only 2 resistors are needed to get
Re:Design (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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That sounds silly. You can "do USB" in a single chip much simpler than a microcontroller. Probably faster and more reliable too.
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Here you go http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html [obdev.at]
vusb is a USB stack for the AVR line of chips. They even have a diagram of how to wire it up. You could also just use any number of micros that come with a USB interface.
As to the number of parts needed to blink an LED using the USB port... You could do it really simply with this http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/FT232R.htm [ftdichip.com]
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That's stupid. If you just want to make a light blink with an LED use a USB port use a USB decoder. That's what they're for.
Insensitive clod! (Score:2)
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"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().
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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 [slashdot.org] game. Sad.
Old idea (Score:2)
I'm all for people building things, but if you just want a polished notification LED for your computer, go to the original creators.
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Actually this little device solves a problem we are having with our new, stupider, Electronic Health Record. The old one would tell lab and xray that a stat order was up by triggering the speaker (lab has it set to the Star Trek Klaxxon sound which gets a tad old, but it's their department). This could just light up at the central computer on a trigger.
You would be surprised how useful stupid things like this can be. Yeah, I can rig an Arduno to do this, but I'm kinda time contstrainted. I can solder th
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You'd have to write software to make the light blink, and since it's hardware you'd have to deal with a driver of some sort. I would be much easier for you to just write software that plays a sound over the speakers.
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I can ... whack on the keyboard for an hour
Not on the hospital's time, pal.
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I have wanted a blink(1) for a while, but the price is very high for what it is. Then add in shipping to the UK, import tax and handling fees.
BlinkStick is cheaper, though you loose the nice plastic enclosure.
Re:Scolllock and Numlock (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 keyboa
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In that case, I suggest a used second keyboard, for about $2, complete with LEDs taped to the top of your monitor. :)
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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.
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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...
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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.
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Heck, just popup a dialog box from a program and skip all this USB to LED flashy stuff. Shesh..
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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.
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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.
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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.
Quaint (Score:4, Funny)
Next up, a circuit to ring a bell when someone calls your phone.
Oh the Baltic names (Score:2)
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I had to take a moment and look this up Quadrupel [wikipedia.org] as I had no idea what that was when I read it.
You can say that name 5 times after one of those? I tip my hat sir, well done. Now where can I find that fine brew, is my question.
Nice. (Score:1)
So someone does something a bit cool and the first thing Slashdot can do is take the piss of his his foreign name.
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"So someone gets a slashvertisment on the front page and the first thing Slashdot can do is take the piss of his his foreign name."
FTFY.
SMD (If you can solder DIL & through hole parts you can solder SOIC & 1206 surface mount) would make that thing 1/3 of the size, allow you to have 3 (e.g. red, yellow, & green) or more LEDs, and might make it worth the asking price.
Or, for the same price or less, you could build a USB 2x16 or 2x20 LCD display.
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So someone does something a bit cool and the first thing Slashdot can do is take the piss of his his foreign name.
I though it was kind of rude too.
DevCon.exe and a red-glowing USB mouse (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I'm all for kit electronics, but e-mail / smartphone notifications are the way to go for computer notifications remotely.
Everyone is not you. There are plenty of reasons not to have your phone connected 24/7. For that matter, there are plenty of people who don't own smart enough phones.
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What's new about this? (Score:3)
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 [stackexchange.com] (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 . . .
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Argh, correct link for the blink(1) Kickstarter - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thingm/blink1-the-usb-rgb-led [kickstarter.com]
Purchase link: http://buy.thingm.com/blink1 [thingm.com] (out of stock, was $30)
The BlinkStick mentioned in the original is $16
The Dream Cheeky was $10 (I think I paid 9 on a woot sale)
Not the product we need. (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Galaxy SIII, S4 are popular phones that include it.
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Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Galaxy SIII, S4 are popular phones that include it.
Right. So almost none, which was my point. Galaxy Note series, and pretty much every other phone on the market that isn't a Blackberry doesn't. Brand new releases don't, showing that it's not just some magic innovation that needed time to be discovered.
I'm convinced Blackberry owns some patents on notification LEDs and other manufacturers can't generally be bothered to license them.
It's pretty silly you think about it. (Score:4, Informative)
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. [lirc.org]
(swap the LED with IR-LED, and control your home theater setup)
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Agreed to the title and the first paragraph.
I once needed a way to create a sound that would not go thru the soundcard (and the attached headphone).
The solution was to connect a piezo-buzzer in series with a capacitor to the TXD of a serial port. Set the baudrate to twice the desired frequency, send a couple of 0x55s and presto.
Yep, having "dumb" hardware available does make life easier.
PC Problem? (Score:3)
Is this a Windoze problem?
Macs already have this functionality built in to notifications.
Classic science fiction (Score:2)
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!
Re:Classic science fiction (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
USB Email Notifier (Score:1)
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 y
thingm blink(1) (Score:3)
Thingm [thingm.com] has a similar series of products called blink(1) [thingm.com]. It runs for about $30, but it is not widely available now. They recently finished . [kickstarter.com]
It's a little on the big side... (Score:2)
Considering how small Bluetooth [amazon.co.uk] adapters can be, this is a little on the chunky side.
And the transformation is complete! (Score:2)
Now that your screen is dominated by huge "apps", I guess you need someplace for notifications ...
I like lights (Score:3)
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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.
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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?