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Busy Status Bar

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1366 points aleksi | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 15:19 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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robertlagrant ◴[14 Oct 24 15:35 UTC] No.41838501[source]▶
I'm a bit dumbfounded by the price tag of $189. Am I wrong?
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puzzlingcaptcha ◴[14 Oct 24 15:45 UTC] No.41838602[source]▶
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.

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1. zeroflow ◴[14 Oct 24 15:53 UTC] No.41838689[source]▶
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.