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Comment by thedanbob | Hacker News Reader

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.

Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.

[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...

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My partner is disabled, and my home office is far enough from the bedroom/her work desk that I sometimes can't hear her when she could use, wants, or needs help. These very different priorities make messaging me difficult for her sometimes, not to mention that I can't know what the urgency is if she messages me over SMS/Signal/etc.

As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.

I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.

That’s a great idea! I remember on an Android phone - maybe Galaxy Nexus, or the original Pixel - you could blink an LED with different colors for different app notifications. I had blue, yellow, red, and green for various apps, and so without ever having the screen turn on or the device make sounds, I could tell if I should bother to check.

To me, not having any sensory disabilities, that’s a lower cognitive load than banners or other text/icon-based notifications.

The first Android phone I owned also had this feature, and it was super helpful.

It's a shame that our phones are becoming more and more voracious surveillance devices without the common courtesy of doing things that are helpful for the user.

The Nexus One [1] from 2010 had a little trackball that could light up for notifications.

While the trackball was understandably nixed in later models (though it was still useful for fine control!), its notification feature is dearly missed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One

It is so useful, for me a must have on every phone. on Android the app aodNotify is what I've been using to recreate it.

I had a samsung with this over 10 years ago.

Or just get a $5 radio doorbell. You know, when it's 'urgent, right now' you don't want to learn what you are too late because for whatever reason internet/wireless/cellular wasn't working.

This ^ anything else is just wanting to play with tech instead of solving the problem immediately. Which is fine, sure, but that radio doorbell (or better, 3 different ones for different priority levels, since it seems important) will fix the issue right now.

This project is also a reason for me to play with LoRA, hence the ESP32, but point taken, certainly.

Rather than do that I would probably hard wire it if the Internet and LoRA are not sufficient.

Or a lamp, an RGB bulb, and a quick app to make a widget to set the color for the low-urgency requests.

If you have Apple devices and share your locations in Find My, she could use the Find My app to make your devices beep loudly and optionally show a message. Great for urgency, since the beep is really loud and doesn’t stop until you tell it to.

Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.

I’ve built a few things like this using Nerves / Elixir on a pi. It’s got a really nice dev experience through to useful deployment and over-the-air updates.

I highly recommend it to anyone building little functional prototypes of this sort.

I've not looked at this space - but with flexible control software, such devices could serve a very wide variety of use cases. And perhaps multiple uses cases simultaneously, far less intrusively than dealing with a variety of alarm & alert systems.

While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.

They said a status board on top of their monitor, not every corner of their house. This seems like a very unobtrusive signal to me. Plus, some people like to hide or obscure their phone from their field of view during work, to minimize distractions. Honestly, the only person I immediately check my phone for is my wife. If I could have a priority indicator along with that, I’d love it. There are some things I need to know immediately (a kid is sick and one of us needs to pick them up, etc.) regardless of what I’m doing, and there are others where it can wait until I’m done with a meeting.

> They said a status board on top of their monitor, not every corner of their house.

No, that was someone else.

Ah, you’re correct.

I thought it went without saying that she's on board with it, and that "need to get a hold of her" meant e.g. "I'm trying to call her but she's out in the shop". 99% of our communication during the day is asynchronous.

Can you explain why it's worse than normal landline phones that you can hear in the entire house?

Why back in MY day we just had 5-7 kids stationed throughout the house. A simple “Joey, go tell Mom” was all you needed!

I remember the year my dad installed an intercom system in the house and then disabled it within a month or two due to its use by children.

No offense, but your privilege is offensively visible.

Deaf people need this.

Yup! I have significant hearing loss to the point that I'm useless without hearing aids.

I'm going to take this idea for my partner to use to get my attention if needed. Having it tie into Home Assistant is a win for me as well.

I don’t have hearing loss but the best way I’ve found to not miss important notifications is a smart watch. Game changing to ensure my wife and I don’t miss each other’s messages around school pickup or anything else important. With an apple watch you can make the vibration pretty unmissable. We both have almost all other notifications silenced so it’s not overly noisy either. I never use sound for any kind of notification anymore - even when expecting important calls.

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