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Looks like fun to me. I know very little about hardware hacking but I had an idea the other day: I wanted to rig a mini-stoplight up (green, amber, red LEDs) t
by davi 18y ago
Looks like fun to me.
I know very little about hardware hacking but I had an idea the other day: I wanted to rig a mini-stoplight up (green, amber, red LEDs) that I could plug into my computer's USB port and hit hot keys to change which LED was lit.
Then my wife could look over and see if I was super-focused or not. When I was thinking about code or trying to do science writing, I would toggle the thing to the red LED; when I was screwing around on HN, I would toggle it to green.
I looked around naively but couldn't find something small & easy. This product could maybe fit the bill nicely.
Whether my wife would appreciate such a thing is another matter. :)
- kirubakaran 18y agoThis can be taken one step further to create a hacker-wife-trainer. Add a water pistol, a microphone and a stepper motor to the set up. Audio signal in wife's frequency range when LED is in red should trigger water pistol in the appropriate direction.
- coryrc 18y agoFold a piece of paper into a triangular prism. Color and write text on it. Turn so appropriate color is facing outward Voilà.
- olefoo 18y agoYou're missing the point. This is the festival of inappropriate technology. If you take your little tri-color prism and mount it end on, on a stepper motor with an optical sensor to detect which color is facing in the signal direction; then you're talking. Extra points for if it: a. has an ethernet port b. reads rss feeds or email
- davi 18y agoI like it, but your idea only works if your back is to a wall. My wife did the boolean version of this, though, when I told her I wanted to spend $100 on a fancy board from National Instruments. She folded a piece of paper in two, wrote "DO NOT DISTURB" on one half, and propped it up next to me.
- Xichekolas 18y agoBonus if you write some code to detect your activity (based on active application or typing/clicking patterns or who knows what) and then communicate via usb to your stoplight. At that point, you could probably sell the thing on thinkgeek.com and watch cubicles everywhere fill up with activity indicators. Of course, there would have to be manual override, so cube workers could set it to red all day when they don't feel like doing anything.
- davi 18y agoNice. Maybe let user build rules like: When a Terminal window is in the foreground and has an open ssh session --> amber When Firefox in foreground, displaying news.ycombinator.com --> green. Never automatic red, though: I would want to conserve its signaling value, so that it would always mean, "if you talk to me right now you are going to mess up a thought structure that was difficult to build". [edit: Hm, a little bluetooth-enabled one of these actually would be a pretty cool thinkgeek product. ]
- GHFigs 18y ago-- In AppleScript while I wait for tea to steep... if application "Terminal" is frontmost then tell application "Terminal" get name of first item of windows of it if result contains "ssh" then set red to false set yellow to true set green to false end if end tell end if -- or a one-liner... if application "Terminal" is frontmost then tell application "Terminal" to ¬ if (name of first item of windows of it contains "ssh") then set stoplight to "yellow"
- jrockway 18y agoThis is even easier with a window manager like Xmonad, since you can configure it to "log" state changes. No polling necessary.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- cardboardbox 18y agoOr maybe you could even rig it up to light up based on what programs were active on your computer. IDE/text edit open -> red light, web browser -> yellow, game -> green.