
How to add a notifier LED to your computer - iuguy
http://www.justblair.co.uk/the-attiny45-usb-led-e-mail-twitter-and-pidgin-notifier.html
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davi
For a long time I've wanted one of these, to serve as an "interruptility"
indicator to others: green = "I'm looking at the internet, please interrupt me
so I can possibly do something more useful", amber = "I'm working but okay",
red = "only interrupt me if it's truly urgent". It could be programmable, so
that (for example) it could automatically go to green when Firefox had HN as
its frontmost window.

Imagine a lab or office in which everyone used an LED in this way. It might be
nice.

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jonknee
Sort of an "On Air" sign for hackers.

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erohead
'Wired in'

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__david__
Maybe 'focused in' or 'zoned in'.

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patrickk
The whole area of ambient displays is interesting. So much information is on
screens now, but for certain situations an ambient display would be a lot more
convenient for conveying information.

See for example the ambient orb which can change colour according to what the
Dow is doing, to name one example:

<http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html>

Or the nabaztag, the wifi rabbit, who raises his ears to different triggers,
such as, I don't know, a broken link on your website or a customer support
email landing in your inbox. Pretty cool.

<http://www.nabaztag.com/en/m-3-nabaztag-what-does-he-do.html>

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windsurfer
Nifty, but my laptop already has LEDs that I don't use, namely numlock and
scroll lock. There are many Linux utilities that can blink these and turn
these on.

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seabee
In the case of numlock on a laptop you need to be smarter than just toggling
the light; many laptops overlay a numpad over the keys, so with numlock
enabled hitting 'I' will send 5 instead.

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joezydeco
You can toggle the lights without changing the actual state of the keyboard or
driver. They're not hardwired together.

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seabee
That's interesting - I tried to do this some years ago on Windows but found no
way to toggle the lights independently of the actual state.

Turns out you can, though:

<http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:7031>

~~~
joezydeco
Back in the day I had some kind of plugin that toggled the caps and scroll
lights based on ethernet Rx and Tx traffic. Nifty hack, but got distracting
real fast.

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wunki
Although I applaud the engineering effort, I would never make this myself
because it will proof a huge distraction.

I would become a slave of my email.

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jrockway
The key to notifications is filtering. Don't make it light up for every email,
only make it light up when an email that needs immediate action arrives.

I'm going to set one of these up to monitor my work email. If someone sends a
message to me (which is a small minority of messages I receive), it will light
up. Then when I'm in bed and feel like hitting the snooze button, I can glance
at the LED and determine whether or not I need to get up and check my email or
not.

laziness++.

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lutorm
Do you really need the microcontroller to do that? He doesn't say exactly what
the ATtiny does, but if it's just setting one of three LEDs based on two pins,
it seems you could accomplish the same thing with a couple of logic gates?
(But maybe these days it's easier to get a microcontroller than to wire up a
few gates?)

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kazuya
Parallel printer port, which was often used for this kind of hacks,
disappeared from PC several years ago. A USB device is usually the best for
general purpose I/O.

And I don't know how to build a USB device 'with a couple of logic gates'.

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lutorm
Is it not possible to simply steer the USB pins high or low just like with a
serial port?

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lmz
USB is a complex protocol, encoded using just two wires (the other two are
power - +5V and GND). There are no pins you can steer high or low.

See <http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb1.shtml> for more info.

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espinchi
I'd like to have some light that indicates the status of our continuous build.
However, I can only find solutions that require too much low-level hacking
(like the original article, very cool but it'd take me ages), or are two
expensive, or not customizable enough (Ambient Orb).

Do you guys know of other solutions?

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dlsspy
That was a lot cooler than I expected. I did a software-only one on my mac:
<http://dustin.github.com/2009/02/09/caps-lock.html>

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gsivil
Very neat. It would be interesting to know if there is a only-software way to
use the available lights on every laptop (battery, wifi indicators) as email
notifiers. Do you think that this would be possible?

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cnvogel
Depending on your laptop model, there are a few LEDs that can be controlled,
at least under Linux.

IBM and ASUS seem to use stuff in /proc/acpi/asus|ibm ...

The SD-Card interface in my Laptop exports a LED in /sys/class/led... (but it
seems not to be connected to anything).

So there is often one or the other thing installed, but how to control them
differs.

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zachrose
It would also be cute to have the terminal bell hooked up to an actual bell.

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icefox
rather than blinking, use morse code and output the message.

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jacquesm
Whoever modded you down has no sense of telecommunications history or humor.

The extra experience all those around you will have learning morse code to
figure out what it is that you're telling them alone is worth an upvote ;)

