Re: [PLUG] usb notification light

Well, the problem here is that USB isn't really intended to be more than power and data lines. There's no logic to talk to an LED directly, so unless you are planning on cycling the power to that port on and off "by hand", you're going to need some logic living between the port and the LED. There are lots of small ARM SBCs that could do this sort of thing easily for you, but you're looking at varying amounts of cost there. I've been thinking of setting up an RPi Zero to do exactly this sort of thing, but via multiple LEDs. Soldering is very likely to be involved, though. You had said 30$ seemed high and that you don't want to get your iron out, but what other criteria are you working from?

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Eric Riese <eric.riese@gmail.com> wrote:

I was looking at the ThingM blink(1) which is a simple USB notification LED. I appreciate that it has some features and there's even integration with IFTTT for instance, but $30 seems a little steep for such simple hardware. Does anyone know of a cheaper alternative? I'm not interested in breaking out the soldering iron.

I have a monitor with USB ports on the side, but I use it in portrait orientation, which would put the light on the top, which is nice, but I don't think I'd be able to use a dumb LED and turn it off by cutting off power to the port.

I love the "About the product" section on Amazon for it:
Can pulse when someone mentions you on twitter
Can glow red if your computers CPU is slammed
Shows the status of your continuous integration build
The third point was exactly my intention.
-Eric

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