Seems like quite a bit of hardware engineering went into the design.
But if you are hacker and don't care too much about the aesthetics you could probably get 90% of the functionality with an ESP32, a GPIO extender, an LED array, an OLED display and a 3D printed case for like $30.
The Ulanzi TC001 devices are kind of near (without the double screen and all the buttons and stuff) for around $50. IIRC they have an ESP32 and have at least 1 or 2 alternative opensource firmwares.
A few years ago, I built a simpler version of that device myself.
As you said: A 90% solution is easy to hack together. I had mine displaying Skype for Business status so my colleagues would know if I was in a call or just listening to music.
The harder part or much rather the time consuming part is getting a good status message from the installed apps. It looks like there is plenty of software and APIs available.
1x some acrylic to laser-cut a case in a makerspace $5
So $24 total. The screen would be much larger than the Busy Bar version, which could be a pro or a con, depending on what you want.
If you need the smaller back screen (I don’t see the use because I would control it from a computer anyways), that would add another $3 or so. The buttons are basically free but if we assume $3, that’s $30 like you said in total.
Who’s doing the case? Who’s doing the buttons? Who’s gonna put it together? Testing? Programming? Flashing?
How about handling returns?
Packaging? Design for all of the above?
Well that’s the point of a DIY project, you are going to do it (if that’s the kind of project you want). I wasn’t saying you should build this thing yourself because the busy bar is bad, I was just giving some more data to the original commenter who said you can build something similar yourself for much cheaper.
It is a bit pricey, but probably not overpriced. This kind of niche product is not going to get good economies of scale, those custom molded plastic parts are going to get pretty expensive when not being produced by the million.
This seems like an item that business would buy in bulk. $180 for single dev version, $90 each in packs of 10. Customized with your company branding maybe.
Price is high … but the right price is the price people are willing to pay.
… and people will pay a lot for anything that tickles their idea of self-identity, allows them to project an image they find favorable, but taps in to some core utility that allows you to provide cover for the prior. See: Apple devices, fitness, business conferences, this device.
the original team is Russian, but they downplay that a lot now (until you buy one and the promo stickers are in Russian). yes, they're registered in Delaware, almost every company that operates in the US is, including foreign companies.
The company makes Flipper Zero as well. When they launched that product, the same topic came up [0]. The strongest argument given seems to hinge on the former nationality/residence of many of the original team. Obviously, different people will weight that above or below the UK address / USA incorporation.
They all do too to varying degrees. You can say "X enables cybercrime" and "Y enables more cybercrime than X" and both could be true for any given X and Y.
For instance, someone buying a flipper is far more likely to do something illegal with it than someone buying a soldering iron. Both could be used only for legal purposes too, of course.
For every news story you can find of someone doing a legal thing with a flipper I can find you at least 10 stories of someone doing something illegal with it. Same for metasploit, nmap is borderline, and soldering irons not so much.
For every news story you can find of someone driving down the highway, I can find you at least 10 stories of someone crashing and burning in a multi-car pileup.
The functionality is a small screen with a timer and a few API calls to set the timer for you sometimes. $189 for a timer is not a lot of functionality for more than 1% of the annual salary of a minimum wage worker. You can get a full android phone for that much which has 10000x the functionality.
If I'm in an open office and can set my status clock on top of a monitor, then I don't need the manual controls because I will be changing it via the computer. If I'm not using a computer and setting the device down on my desk in a cubicle, then the primary screen is going to be turned towards me and I will need to use the manual controls. For that specific set of use cases, I see the logic behind the manual control label positions.
At this price, you can get a second Monitor facing outward and display how long you’ll be busy on that. In fact, you can get 2 monitors and another computer and have some change left. This is a cool product, especially design-wise, but there are much cheaper solution for this very small problem.
To me it looks like a very slick, hacker gadget built from a very enthusiastic person. Good finish and highly over-engineered. For me, as a user, it'd be too expensive, but my hacker soul could imagine building something like that too.
Nice product, but at that price point probably not for a big audience
I recall seeing little USB lights on Amazon that accomplished the same thing for $30. Turn red when your calendar/webcam is active, green when free. Of course, I would be suspicious of the software integration privacy, but different problem.
That's one of many features listed on this page, and they say there's an API for it suggesting that many more features are possible. I wouldn't expect every feature to be for everyone.
I want a work-time tracker that lights a bright LED every 5 minutes or so, and as long as I'm there and working I smash a button and the light goes off for another 5 minutes. Some algorithm tracks the times I have hit the button and displays how long I have been working on said task.
I'm picturing something fairly cheap, like a stop watch or 3 button kitchen timer. A LED, a few buttons, a LCD display, a AAA battery slot, and an internal timing circuit is all that's needed (and a case to hold it together).
This would basically be a stop watch that stops on its own if neglected, and I can imagine a few uses for it.
I assume lawyers have some mechanism like this already. Law firms can require staff to allocate every 6-8 minutes of their day. Which sounds terrible and likely to be wildly inaccurate as people cannot be bothered to invest that much overhead into their job.
For sure that seems the intention. Create an “audit trail” for billing while simultaneously making it so onerous that the employees have to fudge the numbers.
In my experience it just means a lawyer marks each hour via charging you 10 increments, and that in some cases some forms of comms are generally charged at a sub-hourly charge.
In most cases working with a lawyer is a fixed fee or going to be on a retainer basis where the hours pile up regardless, not so much about tracking every moment for every person.
This is how Swiss medical appointments are billed. I forget exactly how granular, but it's pretty small - 5-10 minutes. As a result, you tend to be quite efficient when going to the GP, because it’s a few Francs a minute
If I retain a lawyer at $1k an hour, you bet I want 5 minute billing.
Add an alarm to play VERY LOUD if the button is not pressed in a 5-7 minute window to keep you working. If you fail to do so the entire office/house has to hear your alarm going off
I’ve got this, just some simple JS that flashes bgcolor when the time is up, and I click to extend. I just keep a tiny thin browser on my laptop display
I set it to 15 minutes or it’s too frequent.
I’ve considered a hardware device (and have tried some) but I like to also track time in meetings, so I’d be lugging it around with me.
Oh my, this is something I've been wanting to create. Something simple like an illuminated on-air sign outside my office door. This is awesome, and awesomely over-engineered.
Check out BlyncLights from Embrava. Much simpler and cheaper. I've installed them in a few companies and have one at home so my wife knows when I'm in a meeting or free.
Whenever I see someone with a busy light in the office, I view it as an over-the-top, attention-grabbing, awkward human interaction and an explicit invitation to bother him or her.
It's "don't make me tap the sign" in electronic form.
So this is a cloud connected LED sign that tells people to ~~fuck off~~ leave me alone. For 189 USD. This is the most Hacker News thing I've seen in 2024.
In a way it's the perfect product if your target market is those responsible for the atrocities of the modern web: like why I need a cloud-connected smartphone app that requests full permissions to set up a $10 camera.
This reminds me of my first job in London looking after the network of a recruitment agency. The consultants got headsets for the first time and one got so annoyed about being interrupted when on a call - because you couldn't tell when people were wearing headsets the whole time - that she taped a big bit of card to the top of her headset saying "ON A CALL" that she could flip up and down depending on whether she was speaking to someone.
I used one of those recently at home since my wife can't see my screen, she's not sure if I'm on a call, listening to music or just there. The built in software sucks, but there are some good open source options https://github.com/JnyJny/busylight also works together with https://mutedeck.com/ for supporting things like Zoom.
I had a coworker who felt free to interrupt me at any time. Even if I were frowning and leaning in to read some code word for word, he’d stop by to talk about nothing. I started wearing headphones when I was in concentration mode and that didn’t help. Then I wrote “DO NOT DISTURB” on a post-it note, stuck it to my headphones, and dug in for some thought-intensive hacking. He came to my desk, pulled the note off the headphones I wore, and tapped me on the shoulder, laughing. “Hah, look what someone taped to your head!”
We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.
Surely it would be closer to justice if one were to dispatch the various management gurus and architects who claimed open plan was acceptable and any CEO who agreed with that garbage?
Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!
... or you could have communicated your boundaries & expectations first thing and explicitly instead of doing this weird song and dance and complain on hacker news about it afterwards?
Kinda sounds like I did and they kept ignoring them. Some of us try to approach problems like grownups, even if we leave the details out when they’d break the flow of a story.
I can remember people using various USB "busy lights" since way back in the Skype for Business days. And one of our super old offices has an 80s style wired green/yellow/red light indicator outside of the door, that presumably used to connect to a switch on the desk.
> And one of our super old offices has an 80s style wired green/yellow/red light indicator outside of the door, that presumably used to connect to a switch on the desk.
These light trees used to be (and probably still are in some places) used for the purpose of incident management when in operations centers like NOCs or similar. It is tied to internal status and incident management systems.
Easy fix. Call the person when tbey are on a call. If engaged tbey will be engaged. Then move that person to a house in the suburbs where their kids bappen to also live.
Does this work without cloud-connection? Does it work with the Flipper Zero? Considering it's from the same company, I would think there is some synergy available. And it seems to lack a speaker. For some reason, I would love to play radio on it, not sure why..
Where does it draw power from? Does it have to be permanently connected or does it have a battery?
I have a lilygo T-Display (which costs less than a 10th of the Busy Status Bar), but I intended to use it untethered and freely movable on the desk. Sadly the battery life is so bad that I basically have to leave it plugged in all the time.
> Where does it draw power from? Does it have to be permanently connected or does it have a battery?
Since it's not mentioned in text, extrapolating from the photos (sometimes it's connected with a cable, sometimes not) I'd have to assume it has a battery.
The natural follow up would be: How often do I have to plug it in? If I have to charge it daily it is probably too much of a hassle and I'll have to have it plugged-in all the time.
i thought someone had finally productized a clock i built for myself a long time ago, which, instead of showing you the time of day, counts down to your next meeting
I downvoted this because it is really pejorative to call people sad in this way for doing their jobs. Though I do agree that it stinks sometimes to be focused and have people walk by and cause context shifts.
Regarding the original topic, I mostly work from home and even there like pomodoro timers because they help me focus. Set it for 25 minutes and focus until the time is up, take 5, then get back to it. Works great for me!
Fair point given how poorly I worded it. Maybe I could try again.
Yes it's awesome to collaborate with people but if you find a workplace that ignores human factors of knowledge workers, and deters and deep focus, that is a negative signal about that employer. Egs:
* a noisy, open, "pit" with low/no partitions, where sales guys yell into speakerphones right near people heads down
* there are no "focus booths" to make private calls or work
* meeting load is scattered across the day so there's no way to block out working time on calendar
* adversarial IT dept
This kind of environment does not promote work and also increases stress due to context switching (citation needed) and people walking behind you all day in peripheral view (seen a study somewhere). If you find a place like this, your health and career might be better served elsewhere.
This is incredibly similar to a personal project I've been prototyping. I love that Flipper brought it to market and will buy one. A fully open source & open hardware timer like this would be awesome. Cheaper DIY kit with 3d printable case. Does anyone know if one exists?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadBut if you are hacker and don't care too much about the aesthetics you could probably get 90% of the functionality with an ESP32, a GPIO extender, an LED array, an OLED display and a 3D printed case for like $30.
As you said: A 90% solution is easy to hack together. I had mine displaying Skype for Business status so my colleagues would know if I was in a call or just listening to music.
The harder part or much rather the time consuming part is getting a good status message from the installed apps. It looks like there is plenty of software and APIs available.
8x 8x8 WS2812 Matrix $2 each = $16
ESP32 $3
1x some acrylic to laser-cut a case in a makerspace $5
So $24 total. The screen would be much larger than the Busy Bar version, which could be a pro or a con, depending on what you want.
If you need the smaller back screen (I don’t see the use because I would control it from a computer anyways), that would add another $3 or so. The buttons are basically free but if we assume $3, that’s $30 like you said in total.
LED Matrix: 5 for 6,33€ (that is 1,27€ each)
ESP32 C3 Supermini: 3 for 3,56€ (1,19€ each)
There’s scrap acrylic at my makerspace so I was guessing, make it 10€ and I’m at 23€ or so.
What numbers do you not believe?
Those generic "led pixel clock" tend to be about $50-$80 ish, and this looks like a 'nicer' (in some aspects) fancier, more niche version of that.
… and people will pay a lot for anything that tickles their idea of self-identity, allows them to project an image they find favorable, but taps in to some core utility that allows you to provide cover for the prior. See: Apple devices, fitness, business conferences, this device.
If it was $100 instead of $189, I would order two (one for me, one for partner) as soon as they were available.
The price is a bit high, but glad to see it in the real world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168388
If flipper does, so does Nmap and metasploit and Linux and soldering irons.
For instance, someone buying a flipper is far more likely to do something illegal with it than someone buying a soldering iron. Both could be used only for legal purposes too, of course.
For every news story you can find of someone doing a legal thing with a flipper I can find you at least 10 stories of someone doing something illegal with it. Same for metasploit, nmap is borderline, and soldering irons not so much.
Did Hacker News turn into Daily Deals?
--
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjg6-xT6rJg
To me it looks like a very slick, hacker gadget built from a very enthusiastic person. Good finish and highly over-engineered. For me, as a user, it'd be too expensive, but my hacker soul could imagine building something like that too.
Nice product, but at that price point probably not for a big audience
I want a work-time tracker that lights a bright LED every 5 minutes or so, and as long as I'm there and working I smash a button and the light goes off for another 5 minutes. Some algorithm tracks the times I have hit the button and displays how long I have been working on said task.
I'm picturing something fairly cheap, like a stop watch or 3 button kitchen timer. A LED, a few buttons, a LCD display, a AAA battery slot, and an internal timing circuit is all that's needed (and a case to hold it together).
This would basically be a stop watch that stops on its own if neglected, and I can imagine a few uses for it.
My gut reaction and prejudiced against all lawyers is it's probably in the law firms interest that these are inaccurate.
In most cases working with a lawyer is a fixed fee or going to be on a retainer basis where the hours pile up regardless, not so much about tracking every moment for every person.
If I retain a lawyer at $1k an hour, you bet I want 5 minute billing.
I hate time tracking and time sheets and all of that but at any job I had where I would not get paid without it, it got done.
I set it to 15 minutes or it’s too frequent.
I’ve considered a hardware device (and have tried some) but I like to also track time in meetings, so I’d be lugging it around with me.
Whenever I see someone with a busy light in the office, I view it as an over-the-top, attention-grabbing, awkward human interaction and an explicit invitation to bother him or her.
It's "don't make me tap the sign" in electronic form.
I'm obviously a cheapskate.
Sure, some people will buy it even it was $2000, but I think most people will be put off by the ~$200 price.
Juicero, where are you?
https://www.headsetsdirect.com/product/poly-busy-light-strai...
Also you are right comments like this are very annoying. I'm still surprised that HN doesn't have some kind of spam filter or rate limit
We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.
Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!
Let me guess: you did absolutely nothing?
These light trees used to be (and probably still are in some places) used for the purpose of incident management when in operations centers like NOCs or similar. It is tied to internal status and incident management systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_light
Does this work without cloud-connection? Does it work with the Flipper Zero? Considering it's from the same company, I would think there is some synergy available. And it seems to lack a speaker. For some reason, I would love to play radio on it, not sure why..
EDIT Ok, found the speaker. Nice.
I have a lilygo T-Display (which costs less than a 10th of the Busy Status Bar), but I intended to use it untethered and freely movable on the desk. Sadly the battery life is so bad that I basically have to leave it plugged in all the time.
Since it's not mentioned in text, extrapolating from the photos (sometimes it's connected with a cable, sometimes not) I'd have to assume it has a battery.
https://busy.bar/blog/developing-the-mechanical-and-electric...
https://github.com/jareklupinski/count-down
google and apple dont make it easy...
Regarding the original topic, I mostly work from home and even there like pomodoro timers because they help me focus. Set it for 25 minutes and focus until the time is up, take 5, then get back to it. Works great for me!
Yes it's awesome to collaborate with people but if you find a workplace that ignores human factors of knowledge workers, and deters and deep focus, that is a negative signal about that employer. Egs:
This kind of environment does not promote work and also increases stress due to context switching (citation needed) and people walking behind you all day in peripheral view (seen a study somewhere). If you find a place like this, your health and career might be better served elsewhere.I wouldn't mind working hybrid and going to an office 2-3 days/week as long as the commute was under 20 minutes.
There's an ecosystem of open source firmware for it already.