Blinkit | USB Flash Notifications
With Blinkit it is possible to blink the LED of USB sticks on Steem related actions, and with the latest updates it is also possible to blink Sonoff and Philips hue lamps on new Steem related actions.
The Blinkit project is released for some time now and most of the previous post where about the technical development, this post is about how to get started and about USB accessories that can be used with Blinkit.
Blinkit can blink the LED light of basically any USB stick ever made!
Most people will have USB sticks and accessory's laying around and otherwise they are easy and cheap to get. USB related things can be found in for example supermarkets, stationery shops, dollarshops, street markets, computershops etc. USB accesorys can be used to be more flexible with placing the USB stick around your computer or laptop, or can be used to make modifications.
How to get started with Blinkit?
Find and look inside your old electronics drawers and boxes and collect everything USB related:
-USB sticks
-USB Card-readers (alternative to a USB-stick)
-USB extension cable (optional)
-USB Hub (optional)
Check if the USB Stick(s) (or USB card readers) you found have a status LED, some LEDs are hidden and only become visible when connected / in use by by a computer, be sure to connect them to determent if it have a LED light!
See what combinations you can make and work the most comfortable for you with the USB cables or USB hubs you may have found :
Blinkit Installation instructions
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USB sticks blinking on New upvotes green, red for new posts and the blue one is set to blink on new followers
Recycle your old hardware and give it a new Steem purpose with Blinkit!
If you are using Blinkit in combination with the USB hardware you found, you could help the project by posting about your setup and get my Resteem and Upvote, please be sure to use the blinkit tag.
When you have made modifications to the hardware, you could also share your post with:
If you want to contribute to the development of Blinkit or if you want to get in contact, you can find me in the SteemPi Discord server.
Comments and suggestions are always welcome!
Too fun! Great invention you have made and I hope this post is blinking in your house!!
Thanks, was sleeping but thanks :)
great invention !! i see in it a lot of other applications !! keep it up !!
Thanks for the upvote >binking the LED :) ! please share your thought on other applications for it , it would be nice to make it work with for example twitter and bring twitter audience in contact with Steem trough Blinkit.
If you have suggestions for features please let me know!
well did not read what you already did but what i could think is:
instead of only flashing a led of any usb or any light it could send a notification to your smartphone or tablet, connected to any wifi ,about what did just happen (new follower, new comment, resteemed, etc...).
personally i would connect it to an arduino that will elaborate the info and send it via its wifi shield as a notification to my smartphone (but i think you could add this feature directly in the code of your software).
The ideology is to use easy and widely available hardware, i like Arduino and Pi's, but not everyone have them and can work with them, with USB sticks the opposite is the case most people have them and know how to se them.
Though it would be fun to connect it to a Arduino and play around with it, i tend to keep the future development mostly based around USB sticks and smart lamps and lights.
A technical improvement on the wishlist would be to replace a led of a USB stick to a brighter led, and colour of choice. with minimal components, but because im focusing more on the average users, this part of the project is not yet worked out / looked into.
well i dont know in details how your code works but i assume in order to blink the led of a usb stick the PC/laptop/whatever should recognize a device (assign a port,etc...) so each usb will have its univoque "address". In order to blink a brighter led you must use an interface that lets your PC recognize it as a separate device (using arduino would make the job much easier and you could activate anything). how do you immagine blinking a brighter led ??
Because i want to limit external components i was just thinking about making a sub project about how to replace the SMD led and add a brighter one (in the desired colour).
But i am also getting more interested to also add Arduino support :)
It is feasable but as "not everyone has an Arduino" i can add that not everybody has the knowledge of soldering and pinout of led etc... Changing a led in a usb stick for me is very easy (just add a small transistor for switching higher current "if required" and connect to it the brighter led with collector of the transistor getting the power from the 5+DC of the usb socket of the same USB plug just do a small bridge with a wire internally).... The problem would be solved and much easier if the initial place where the smd led is connected supports even a higher current. Inthat case you would directly solder the brighter led in lieu of the smd one...
Getting things into arduino would make it very interesting because you have thousands of conbinations (blink lights/leds/whatever, post a notification on a led matrix screen or tft screen, send via wifi or ethernet a notification to another device, etc...)
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This post has received a 4.31 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @techtek.