Side note to people reading this: in general, when suspecting a scam, don't blindly trust anyone who says "I'm ... and I confirm this is OK". This may be the same very person who you're suspecting of original scam ;). Not a theory, I have cases looks this every other week in my dayjob.
It might ring better for the cypherpunks here that zhovner has verified their HN account ownership with their keybase GPG key, which can only be done by editing an account's profile description to include a specific signature (or by defacing HN / breaching the account). And the same key is also used to prove ownership of their Github account and website.
More important note to people reading this: use your brain. Is it likely that a scammer will create an extremely professional website and product, and then their scam is that ride the coat tails of another brand and try to keep that scam up with Hacker News comments?
(I think lots of HN people have issues with reality so just in case the answer is: absolutely not.)
Yes, actually. Well, everything except the last point. If you're unfamiliar with UFO 50, it's a recent collection of games inspired by 80s-esque computer game design. The reason why I bring this up is because there's a website (ufo50.net) which is actually fake and completely unrelated to the actual ufo50 site (50games.fun) which is designed to be SEO-bait so that it can absorb traffic from search engines.
I'd love for this thing to be feature-flexible enough to use it for the exact opposite: running TV/screen/videogame timer for the kids!
Looks great, love the dial/switch big button combo, and the opportunity to buy something attractive that's a "hackable screen with buttons" is very high for me.
Another likely use is to be a controller for audiobooks or music in our rumpus if I ever get a hold of one. Again, drivable by kids and oldies who visit is a huge plus.
However, the original inventor of the Pomodoro technique explicitly advocates a "low tech" approach - a mechanical kitchen timer, because he argued that the tactile and auditory elements (i.e., the turning moves and ticking sounds) get associated with the elements of the techniques in the human brain.
It would be interesting to evaluate both variants of the approach in a scientific experiment.
This product (1) is not just for Pomodoro and (2) has nice tactile hardware.
I think hardware that can "passively" be more useful with sensors and similar are easy wins. No reason it has to disrupt a timer, it just hides sensors you'd want within a device that would already be sitting out in your home/office.
It looks gorgeous, especially the hardware. I think the typeface on the hardware and the retro busy text could be further refined, but it is very very cool overall.
> What are the odds of a kit version woth a lower pricetag and some assembly required?
Or even better, a version that ships with everything besides "the brain" and allows us to use our Flipper Zero as the brain :) Looking at the old blog articles about the project, it seems it got started with using Flipper Zero as the brain, so maybe it's not that far-fetched.
"We are looking for a professional multidisciplinary designer to join our Busy Status Bar team and help bring the product to Kickstarter, generating excitement among future users."
And interestingly none of the socials I could find are mentioning it.
I am not saying it is a scam it's just very strange that all connections between busy.bar and flipper devices are one way. One would expect some two way mentions
Every scam website ever made that pretends to be part of a known business copies that business's footer text, it's not remotely relevant in trying to judge whether a website is telling the truth or not about who owns it.
(And in case anyone reads my comment without seeing that the founder of Flipper already commented confirming this is theirs, not a scam: that's the case.)
Actually fake ones will inevitably show "(c)" because they couldn't get authorization for the copyright key. If you zoom in you can see the gaps in the circle betraying the deception.
To be extra cautious, select it to make sure it's real text and not a screenshot of a real copyright notice - this is a common workaround. There is also one known proof of concept exploit using false glyphs in web fonts - this is why many security researchers disable the loading of fonts.
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If you're looking for something with an addressable LED matrix in a clock style form factor, the Ulanzi TC001 [0] for ~$50 is worth having a look at.
Doesn't quite have the same aesthetic but inside it's just an ESP32 (flashed via the USB-C port) and there's various mature open source firmware replacements. I use awtrix[1] on mine and it's very easy to tie in HomeAssistant for doorbell notifications and that sort of thing. I did also knock up a Pomodoro app for it.
I was going to say that $200 seemed awfully expensive for a programmable kitchen timer.
I've had a project idea for a while that would require a bit more juice. In short, I want to make a music practice timer for ADHD kids that avoid actually playing music during practice time. I want it to be beefy enough to run some simple ML for detecting instruments being played, and I only want the timer to count down while the instruments are playing. I picture it looking a lot like the clock above, but with something like a Raspberry Pi jammed inside so it's got enough power to reliably detect "violin."
The ESP32S(1?) that's inside is fairly powerful as embedded mcus go but that said...
If you need grunt and you don't specifically want the aesthetic of an led matrix panel you'd probably be better off with an old phone or tablet based thing.
The TC001 afaik doesn't have any mics inside anyway.
Hate to burst your bubble, but as an amateur musician I fear this would backfire, or at least fail to result in any improvement in playing ability. Silence and time are absolutely critical to playing music. By analogy, measuring 'time spent drawing bow across strings' would be as useful to a violin student as 'time spent pressing foot on accelerator' would be to a driving student!
From my own experience learning to play the organ, I have improved least when I play relatively fluidly, practising with music well within my abilities. On the contrary, the most improvement has come when I've slowed down, allowed myself to count the timing, repeat sections, read the sheet music more carefully or even just take a break entirely. So although silence won't improve one's playing by itself, I think it's a natural by-product of an effective studying technique that, if at all possible, shouldn't be discouraged with such a timer.
I'm assuming the child is question is not so much adversarial so much as ADHD. They'll be actively looking to divert their attention to more stimulating activities than playing an instrument but not attempting to cheat the system. And I'm assuming a parent is present but not necessarily in full control of the child. Or it could work equally well for an adult in a similar situation.
"Identifying Different Musical Instrument Sounds Using Fourier Analysis in LabVIEW"
Rather than "ML" du jour, I would say that a fast Fourier transform would get you sufficient data to determine if practicing or talking or silence.
Definitely valid callout. I was also looking for an excuse to play with audio ML, but you're totally right that just examining a Fourier series could very likely do a great job of determining whether a given type of instrument is being played.
As I'm too late to edit - if you use it in a setting where it's always powered, you might want to consider removing the battery as a safety measure. It's a fairly simple hardware hack, various YouTube videos and blogs on the subject.
This looks great! I've considered building a simple device with an LED matrix that looks similar to this, but could never figure out what gives the LEDs the muted look. All of the devices mentioned here (Tidbyt Gen2, Lamarca, Ulanzi, even the busy.bar) have it. Is the back-pannel just an LED matrix with a custom acrylic in front of it? How do they ensure the light from individual LEDs doesn't bleed into its neighbor?
I wouldn't swear to it but from mine it looks like there's a grid of light guides between the led PCB and the front screen to prevent any cross bleed. The front screen is translucent but not transparent (think heavy tinted window) acrylic which gives it the muted look.
It's pretty good hardware wise, it would be hard to knock up DIY for $50 even just in BOM.
Neat! This is very close to what I want. I am looking for a very affordable device like this to affix to my home office doors. I would like it to be programmable allowing me to set the status to Don't Enter when I am having a Zoom call, etc.
Yes, exactly, thank you! I have a Tidbyt that I enjoy but it's pricy and has a subscription local API. I thought the thing in the OP might be a discount smart home alternative and was hoping to find exactly this kind of alternative recommendation in the comments.
This looks exactly what I have been looking for to put outside of my home office to keep my family from interrupting me during work meetings. Thanks for sharing it!
Neat! Can't tell if it has a speaker at the back or not. Would like to play sounds or alarms...
I'd love to attach this to a PoE to USB-C ethernet adapter to talk to it over API via hardwired. Still looking for something like that. The flipper busy bar seems to at least have some connectivity over USB.
I have to warn that it sounds like hot garbage though. The neat thing with ESP32 devices is that you can make it sound okay using its built in 8-bit DACs, or great using I²S.
Speaking of hardware hacking; you can also get POE/LAN adaptors for the ESP32, if you have free hardware pins left for it.
+1 for the hot garbage piezo, but as OP says the ESP32 has a lot of fun hacking potential and there's plenty of space in the case especially if you remove the battery.
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 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.
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.
I got a giant usb-controlled traffic light at my first job in Germany for a customer project. They just let me keep it after the project finished, which made me repurpose it as a busy light and it worked wonders except that one person who didn't get the hint.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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
For a home-rolled solution, I use a GE CYNC ST19 Edison Style bulb in a socket right outside my office door. I have it configured through Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/), and then use Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/) on my macbook to make an API call to Home Assistant when the camera state changes.
If my camera turns on/off, so does the light bulb. Works really well for letting my family know I'm busy in meetings.
A bit dystopian turning people into a taxi-like system where you need an indicator to tell if they are vacant or not.
Regardless, I'm struggling to know the audience here. Is it an employee in the office? If that’s the case, it won’t solve any problem because most of the disturbances happen from your boss either calling about something or asking you to join another useless meeting. Your boss won’t care about your status simply because they won’t be collocated in the same office as you most of the time (not that they care about your online status anyway). For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time. At home, you won’t need such a thing. So I don’t know who will find it useful; it looks gimmicky.
What’s next, a hat that will turn a green light telling people you are approachable or in the chatting mode, and red when you are not?!
After reading the page, it seems clear it is akin to a recording studio busy signal, well-trodden territory predating computers, and marketed for video conferencing. Neither without target audience, nor a sigil of the fall of interhuman cooperation and communication :)
You have not said what the market is. Recording studios have a solution. And probably don't use pomedero. And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
Hmm, you sure? I checked OP, it says "marketed for video conferencing"
> Recording studios have a solution.
Okay.
> And probably don't use pomedero.
*pomodoro
> And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
Okay.
> So who is this device for again?
Video conferencing, ex. the above scenario you laid out
> I'm curious, I'm not just rushing through an attempt to correct something that doesn't need correction. How do they envision it in use?
Here's a link to the site, it has marketing material re: this. https://busy.bar/
For context, we are replying to a comment putting that marketing into question. Therefore the "RTFA" card is not in your deck to play. (I say with a tongue in cheek tone: no flamewar intended!)
In particular GP said:
> For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time.
I think I agree. Back in 2003 my boss said "when my headset is on I am busy". He had to remind everyone a few times. But that worked.
Reductio ad absurdum: If its for recording studios, fine. If not, get off my lawn, its just reinventing having a conversation.
It's telling that both obstinate refusals to not understand what its for end up on unrelated stories about bosses. Let's call it PHB derangement syndrome.
It never seemed likely it was that confusing, it's pretty hard to have been alive from 2020-2024 and claim that there's never any reason for anyone to know anyone else is on a video call. I guess I'm lucky I can take out my Monday scaries via pointing out the obvious, it'd suck to be on the other side and have to pretend I'm stupid.
It’s very pretty; but it’s also a little sad - that there could be demand for a big red flashing IRL “busy” indicator.
If I’m busy and if it happens so often that I can reliably buy a device like this, I would instead prefer to adjust my work environment to not be distracting, and to inform people that they should contact me at some other time.
> sad - that there could be demand for a big red flashing IRL “busy”
Busy is the virture most people want to signal most of the time. Next time someone ask how things are tell people you are not busy, its elicits a similar response to telling people your distant uncle died.
The mode where it sits on a monitor and displays a status ("on call") is very interesting. I think that could be simplified into a product unto itself -- but it would need to priced at "office toy" level -- so around $20-$40 USD.
I was gonna seriously consider it for $89. But then I noticed it’s $189. Hard pass. It’s a shame because it’s a neat idea. I’d be ok even with just some core functionality
Nice product, I built a similar (but less flexible) system for an "ON AIR" sign that I have in my home office, as both my wife and I WFH, it is nice to have a visual indicator when one of us joins a call.
Software for Linux and Mac is here [0]. There's also an ESP32 for the sign, but that part is trivial (MQTT -> LED)
I'm a sucker for metal things with greebling. The price seems pretty fair for how niche this is; I totally expected Teenage Engineering prices. (Also in the field of greebled single use devices with knobs and the mass of a blunt-force-weapon) Will totally pick one up for the hardware's skookumosity and hackability poetential alone!
It definitely looks to be made of a metal. To be fair, I'm just basing that off the texture and specular highlights in the photos. It's pretty similar looking to the iMac's case in one of their photos.
I would actually bet it’s plastic, having a hollow tube-like structure made from metal would be very wasteful because you would have to mill out the entire core (unless it’s cast metal?). Also, the texture looks much coarser than the iMac, there are large „bumps“ on the surface. If it’s really a milled aluminum case, I would at least understand the price, but I would be very surprised. My bet would be a simple injection moulded ABS case.
The display is a resolution of 72x16, or 1152 px. I counted; there's a couple of frames as the first "busy" mention displays that the splashing animation lights the entire panel.
For comparison, the Ulanzi TC001 mentioned throughout this thread is 32x8, for 256 pixels.
I think if one was wanting to build something like this for themselves that just using a 7" ips display intended for rpi would work as well. With 1024x600 resolution you could draw the chunky pixels if you wanted that aesthetic, and those can be had for like $28.
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.
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.
I suffer from ADHD and the pomodoro timer part interests me. However, I am not sure if a pomodoro timer would help me. And $200 is an expensive gamble.
Good call on being cautious here. Unfortunately, there isn't anything between this product and the most basic, basic, basic timer for you to test out if the pomodoro method would work for you.
Interestingly, this "official" Pomodoro site doesn't offer a physical timing device on their shop page.
It looks like the inventor of the technique is now based out of Dubai (allergic to taxes? The governments that you lean on to enforce your reigstered trademarks need to be funded somehow).
It looks very neat, and I love all the physical controls, but it seems like kind of a device from another time where everyone worked in-person all the time. I work a hybrid schedule, with a mostly distributed team, and hotdesk/hotel when I'm in the office, so I don't have the luxury of a physical device to indicate my status, nor much use for one.
That said, I really want something designed like this that I can use.
Truly, it's so hard for me to not see this as just dressed-up techie-flavored consumerism. If you can't look at your phone to run a timer without getting distracted, I think there's a different problem to solve.
(reminder that Android makes it trivial to not show notifications on the lock screen, or even in the top bar. I see notifications only when I want to.)
Feels like a problem in search for a solution to me. Although I haven’t worked in an office for a while now, so it could be that I’m not understanding the importance in such setting (or whatever is this device’s target use environment) that can’t be replaced with a sticky note.
I don't work in an office anymore either, but when I did (years ago), I would get constantly interrupted by people walking up to my desk and talking to me. I like talking to people but I also need uninterrupted focus time.
I made something similar with a blink USB light: https://blink1.thingm.com/ . I had a little sign that said "when it's red, I'm busy". And a keyboard shortcut to toggle it from red to green (it just ran a little bash script that invoked the blink CLI). It was duct-taped to my monitor so you could see it from far away.
It worked very well to prevent interruptions from other people walking up to my desk and chatting with me.
I had the same issue when I was in an office and we were getting close to a deadline, so everyone was constantly chatting about this and that to unblock themselves. It's understandable when the rhythm of the office gets to that point that people want answers now, but it would get to ridiculous levels where you couldn't focus for 10 minutes before somebody else came by with a question.
I never got to the point of having a USB light as a semaphore or anything like that, but I really wanted to find and hack a toy traffic light that would indicate if it was a good time to interrupt me or not. So yeah, it was a very real problem.
Geez the creator obviously doesn't think this is a necessity. It's just introducing a little whimsy and fun. Nobody cares if you don't want to buy or use it.
OMG, I love this. The one missing feature: a high quality camera. As soon as I saw the screen mount, I immediately thought of Continuity Camera, which is a great solution for people who want decent video without a full streamer rig.
I wouldn't have thought this kind of thing would be useful, but after trying a few pomodoro timers I ended up with one (TimeTimer Plus) that is so large that it had the unanticipated benefit of notifying others how long I'll be busy.
However, I will say it depends a great deal on your coworkers/family as to whether they care that you're busy when they want to ask you something.
I quite like the large format for a timer. I have some much lower tech alternative that works wonders for helping keep me focused on tasks: https://www.timetimer.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back when I worked in an office and had to do deep thinking without interruptions, I'd string up a bit of yellow police-like tape that I stole from the SGI offices that were closed during Shoreline concerts that said "SILICON GRAPHICS". Worked perfectly.
In the monitor screenshot it occured to me that you need to choose back or front. But in most open offices you will probably need a 360 dispaly. A circle design that scrolls might work.
Also pomedero breaks are also busy. Having a break is something. Being interupted during that break is no better than being interuppted during the work part.
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
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..
Rad device! Not here to gripe about the actual price - and I realize it's counter-intuitive since we say "one hundred dollars" out loud - but in the US, the dollar sign goes before the amount: $189 not 189$
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"that's my pomodoro timer, it's from a Russian company that specializes in devices that enable various forms of cybercrime. you may have heard of the widespread wave of fraud circa 2019"
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.
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.
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.
With all the controls and lights to fiddle with, this Busy Bar hanging off a techbro monitor... is kinda like the Busy Box that was hanging off their crib.
The majority of Eurozone countries do put the numbers before the €, but it's not standard across the continent, each country has their own standard and some of them do have the euro sign first.
(To save a click: Netherlands plus Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, and Turkey are the Eurozone countries which write €1 - which is also the official way to write it in English. Edit: oops, Turkey should be with England in that it's not a Eurozone country, they have their own Turkish lira, but in their language Euro amounts should be written €10, even though lira amounts are written 10TL.)
Separate of the product itself...I have to compliment whoever designed the landing page! I'm not a UX/UI/page design expert, but here is what i experience:
* the page loads quick - without overlays, distractions, etc. the page gets to the point, and fast
* immediately i see a description of what the product is...this might sound funny, but tons of product sites lack this most basic thing!
* In addition, the very brief video at the top shows a human hand operating the product...so i know even more about its functions, or at least how to interact with product
* a call-to-action of "BUY" is present and impossible to miss, positioned right after/below the product intro/description
* as i scroll down, the experience is NOT janky...its a smooth scroll down the page
* scrolling down informs me more about the product, including its features, different angles of the physical product (to help denote the features), they even squeeze in that there are developer options - so i'm tipped off that its not only a consumer device, but that it can be integrated with other systems, expanded by devs, etc.!
* they include more product photos in order to show how the product may appear and/or be used in real life
* they even include photo and description of certain features - which serve almost as a very brief user guide, but again, i'm sure the intent is to show off the product's feature set
There probably are other great things about this page that i have not noted here...But, again, kudos to the person/team who designed this! I see many teams that are really intelligent, and might have great products/service, but they don;'t include half the elements present here. Because while i don't have interest in this product, damn, this an extremely compelling experience for their product! Cheers and kudos to all involved!!!!!!!
One thing missing though is the why. It took me a while to realise this is intended for people in open plan offices to communicate when they are disturbable.
Still it's interesting to me as a WFH person to potentially better delineate for myself focus mode.
Agree, except the product price could be right on the buy button. Now the analytics won't tell you whether I clicked on the buy button with an intent to buy, or did I just want to know how much it is.
Agree completely - so much I just had to echo your observations ;-)
I love the aesthetics and simplicity at display here. Very functional and just the right amount of information. Kudos to the Busy Status Bar team from here as well!!
It is totally defective in 100% zoom, I need to manually zoom to 90% to make it be usable/as designed.
It seems to activate cell phone mode for laptop screens.
Edit: I don't get why people are downvoting this (-4 and counting). I enter the site and it is broken, until I change to a non-default zoom level. Valuable feedback IMO
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.
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!
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.
First the Nintendo alarm clock and now a sign that says "busy" - But it's hackable!
You nerds will buy anything
Is there any message from the Flipper Zero people that this is actually their device?
It’s not mentioned on https://www.flipperdevices.com/, neither on https://flipperzero.one/ or their Instagram?
They have been plagued with peopling scamming people in their name before
Hi, Pavel Zhovner here, Flipper Devices CEO. Yes it's our product, but it's not ready for announcement yet, so we keep it secret.
Right now, we are working on implementing Matter smart home protocol and will slightly change the product concept.
Side note to people reading this: in general, when suspecting a scam, don't blindly trust anyone who says "I'm ... and I confirm this is OK". This may be the same very person who you're suspecting of original scam ;). Not a theory, I have cases looks this every other week in my dayjob.
In this case I believe the post is legit.
It might ring better for the cypherpunks here that zhovner has verified their HN account ownership with their keybase GPG key, which can only be done by editing an account's profile description to include a specific signature (or by defacing HN / breaching the account). And the same key is also used to prove ownership of their Github account and website.
Or he's been playing the long game and fake-submitted the Show HN post for flipper zero four years ago just to be ready for this day. ;-)
(or the account was compromised, of course)
More important note to people reading this: use your brain. Is it likely that a scammer will create an extremely professional website and product, and then their scam is that ride the coat tails of another brand and try to keep that scam up with Hacker News comments?
(I think lots of HN people have issues with reality so just in case the answer is: absolutely not.)
Yes, actually. Well, everything except the last point. If you're unfamiliar with UFO 50, it's a recent collection of games inspired by 80s-esque computer game design. The reason why I bring this up is because there's a website (ufo50.net) which is actually fake and completely unrelated to the actual ufo50 site (50games.fun) which is designed to be SEO-bait so that it can absorb traffic from search engines.
I'd love for this thing to be feature-flexible enough to use it for the exact opposite: running TV/screen/videogame timer for the kids!
Looks great, love the dial/switch big button combo, and the opportunity to buy something attractive that's a "hackable screen with buttons" is very high for me.
Another likely use is to be a controller for audiobooks or music in our rumpus if I ever get a hold of one. Again, drivable by kids and oldies who visit is a huge plus.
Put a CO2 + temp/humidity sensor in there and it's a no-brainer. The sensors could be nice to hack on too.
And double the price?
Temp/humidity is simple enough, but reasonably priced CO2 sensors with any accuracy are an issue
It's a beautiful site and product.
However, the original inventor of the Pomodoro technique explicitly advocates a "low tech" approach - a mechanical kitchen timer, because he argued that the tactile and auditory elements (i.e., the turning moves and ticking sounds) get associated with the elements of the techniques in the human brain.
It would be interesting to evaluate both variants of the approach in a scientific experiment.
https://www.amazon.com/-/en/38-1005/dp/B00335P518 - about €7 or $13, depending on your geography
This product (1) is not just for Pomodoro and (2) has nice tactile hardware.
I think hardware that can "passively" be more useful with sensors and similar are easy wins. No reason it has to disrupt a timer, it just hides sensors you'd want within a device that would already be sitting out in your home/office.
Also add PM (Particulate Matter) and VOC.
with matter support that could just well integrate with the rest of home automation. There is a lack of devices with big nice dials for that.
+1 CO2/PM2.5
so now we're talking a $500 device? they're already asking ~$200 for a feature stop watch
hell yes!
It looks gorgeous, especially the hardware. I think the typeface on the hardware and the retro busy text could be further refined, but it is very very cool overall.
(Looking at the renders, there are at least four different fonts on the device. It would probably look better if you used fewer.)
Is there any message from the Flipper Zero people that this is actually their CEO? :)
No need, the user profile (cryptographically) links to their keybase profiles which corroborates the identity. The future is here! :)
And... How do we know the key base profile is correct?
Here is how Keybase works: https://book.keybase.io/docs/server
Then take a look at the HN profile, which leads you to the Keybase profile.
I really wish keybase had taken off. I should have realized it was going to fail once they started adding the cryptocurrency wallet.
Keyoxide seems OK as an alternative: https://keyoxide.org/aspe:keyoxide.org:Q6B7ZBQITV7IE2RG4EMVK...
Doesn't have any of the social "features".
Hi Pavel Zhovner. I'm afraid you're not doing a very good job of keeping it secret.
What are the odds of a kit version woth a lower pricetag and some assembly required?
> What are the odds of a kit version woth a lower pricetag and some assembly required?
Or even better, a version that ships with everything besides "the brain" and allows us to use our Flipper Zero as the brain :) Looking at the old blog articles about the project, it seems it got started with using Flipper Zero as the brain, so maybe it's not that far-fetched.
Looks nice. We should have known from the way it looks that it is either you guys or Teenage Engineering.
unrelated: how come you can't buy your device on amazon?
It is mentioned at their "We're hiring" page https://flipperdevices.com/jobs#!/tab/282752814-2
"We are looking for a professional multidisciplinary designer to join our Busy Status Bar team and help bring the product to Kickstarter, generating excitement among future users."
It is (but in russian)
Pavel Zhovner (a lead of flipper devices) wrote about Busy status bar 3 months ago in his Telegram channel (https://t.me/zhovner_hub/2073).
At https://flipperzero.one/ you can find habr.com blog link. The first post in Flipper blog was made by Zhovner https://habr.com/ru/users/zhovner/ (who has a link to telegram channel zhovner_hub).
> Главная идея в том, чтобы сказать людям “отъебитесь на 15 минут” еще до того как вас отвлекли.
This explanation is much more forthright.
For the lazy:
“The main idea is to tell people to ‘F—— off for 15 minutes’ before they get to interrupt you.”
Flipper Zero’s UK jobs page is currently advertising for a designer to work on the Busy Bar:
https://flipperdevices.com/jobs#!/tab/282752814-2
…linked at the bottom of https://flipperzero.one/
Check the footer.
That doesn't prove anything.
And interestingly none of the socials I could find are mentioning it.
I am not saying it is a scam it's just very strange that all connections between busy.bar and flipper devices are one way. One would expect some two way mentions
It literally says: "Flipper Devices Designed by Flipper Devices Inc. © 2024. All rights reserved."
Every scam website ever made that pretends to be part of a known business copies that business's footer text, it's not remotely relevant in trying to judge whether a website is telling the truth or not about who owns it.
(And in case anyone reads my comment without seeing that the founder of Flipper already commented confirming this is theirs, not a scam: that's the case.)
Yeah, and those “PayPal” emails telling me to enter my creds must be legit because they say “PayPal © 2024” at the bottom, with a link to paypal.com.
Actually fake ones will inevitably show "(c)" because they couldn't get authorization for the copyright key. If you zoom in you can see the gaps in the circle betraying the deception.
To be extra cautious, select it to make sure it's real text and not a screenshot of a real copyright notice - this is a common workaround. There is also one known proof of concept exploit using false glyphs in web fonts - this is why many security researchers disable the loading of fonts.
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Anyone can put that there
I wonder how many people bought this item without checking that it's legitimate?
Zero, because there's no checkout page yet. Just a mailing list for status updates.
That would put a crimp in any purchase plans, to be sure.
I'm 97% sure 0 people bought this thing, seeing as it isn't available to buy yet.
Caveat empor my dude.
emptor :)
Caveat emperor
If you're looking for something with an addressable LED matrix in a clock style form factor, the Ulanzi TC001 [0] for ~$50 is worth having a look at.
Doesn't quite have the same aesthetic but inside it's just an ESP32 (flashed via the USB-C port) and there's various mature open source firmware replacements. I use awtrix[1] on mine and it's very easy to tie in HomeAssistant for doorbell notifications and that sort of thing. I did also knock up a Pomodoro app for it.
0: https://www.ulanzi.com/products/ulanzi-pixel-smart-clock-288...
1: https://github.com/Blueforcer/awtrix3
I was going to say that $200 seemed awfully expensive for a programmable kitchen timer.
I've had a project idea for a while that would require a bit more juice. In short, I want to make a music practice timer for ADHD kids that avoid actually playing music during practice time. I want it to be beefy enough to run some simple ML for detecting instruments being played, and I only want the timer to count down while the instruments are playing. I picture it looking a lot like the clock above, but with something like a Raspberry Pi jammed inside so it's got enough power to reliably detect "violin."
Any ideas on hardware for that?
The ESP32S(1?) that's inside is fairly powerful as embedded mcus go but that said...
If you need grunt and you don't specifically want the aesthetic of an led matrix panel you'd probably be better off with an old phone or tablet based thing.
The TC001 afaik doesn't have any mics inside anyway.
Hate to burst your bubble, but as an amateur musician I fear this would backfire, or at least fail to result in any improvement in playing ability. Silence and time are absolutely critical to playing music. By analogy, measuring 'time spent drawing bow across strings' would be as useful to a violin student as 'time spent pressing foot on accelerator' would be to a driving student!
From my own experience learning to play the organ, I have improved least when I play relatively fluidly, practising with music well within my abilities. On the contrary, the most improvement has come when I've slowed down, allowed myself to count the timing, repeat sections, read the sheet music more carefully or even just take a break entirely. So although silence won't improve one's playing by itself, I think it's a natural by-product of an effective studying technique that, if at all possible, shouldn't be discouraged with such a timer.
The adversarial child would be playing recordings into the timer within minutes no?
I'm assuming the child is question is not so much adversarial so much as ADHD. They'll be actively looking to divert their attention to more stimulating activities than playing an instrument but not attempting to cheat the system. And I'm assuming a parent is present but not necessarily in full control of the child. Or it could work equally well for an adult in a similar situation.
"Identifying Different Musical Instrument Sounds Using Fourier Analysis in LabVIEW" Rather than "ML" du jour, I would say that a fast Fourier transform would get you sufficient data to determine if practicing or talking or silence.
Definitely valid callout. I was also looking for an excuse to play with audio ML, but you're totally right that just examining a Fourier series could very likely do a great job of determining whether a given type of instrument is being played.
As I'm too late to edit - if you use it in a setting where it's always powered, you might want to consider removing the battery as a safety measure. It's a fairly simple hardware hack, various YouTube videos and blogs on the subject.
This 16x32 RGB LED panel (6.75"x2.75", USB powered, Bluetooth programmable) was $15 for a while, now $26: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CP5P7RY7
Programming it with your own code is still a mess, see "Panel Communication": https://github.com/auc0le/JT-Edit
Could be even cheaper as a string of addressable LEDs + some arduino board.
But quite some people are happy to pay the extra $174 for not needing to hack together software, a housing, physical controls, etc.
I have 2 of them and love them, blueforcer firmware supports home assistant and I can mix it with automations
This looks great! I've considered building a simple device with an LED matrix that looks similar to this, but could never figure out what gives the LEDs the muted look. All of the devices mentioned here (Tidbyt Gen2, Lamarca, Ulanzi, even the busy.bar) have it. Is the back-pannel just an LED matrix with a custom acrylic in front of it? How do they ensure the light from individual LEDs doesn't bleed into its neighbor?
I wouldn't swear to it but from mine it looks like there's a grid of light guides between the led PCB and the front screen to prevent any cross bleed. The front screen is translucent but not transparent (think heavy tinted window) acrylic which gives it the muted look.
It's pretty good hardware wise, it would be hard to knock up DIY for $50 even just in BOM.
Edit: teardown in German https://youtu.be/-Dn3A5V8ZPo @ 04:30
> custom acrylic
While I'm not an expert, my own experimentation suggests this is correct
Neat! This is very close to what I want. I am looking for a very affordable device like this to affix to my home office doors. I would like it to be programmable allowing me to set the status to Don't Enter when I am having a Zoom call, etc.
Very simple if you flash it with awtrix, it has a neat JSON API.
Yes, exactly, thank you! I have a Tidbyt that I enjoy but it's pricy and has a subscription local API. I thought the thing in the OP might be a discount smart home alternative and was hoping to find exactly this kind of alternative recommendation in the comments.
This looks exactly what I have been looking for to put outside of my home office to keep my family from interrupting me during work meetings. Thanks for sharing it!
Neat! Can't tell if it has a speaker at the back or not. Would like to play sounds or alarms...
I'd love to attach this to a PoE to USB-C ethernet adapter to talk to it over API via hardwired. Still looking for something like that. The flipper busy bar seems to at least have some connectivity over USB.
It has a small piezo buzzer, and you can use it to play RTTTL sounds. https://blueforcer.github.io/awtrix3/#/sounds
I have to warn that it sounds like hot garbage though. The neat thing with ESP32 devices is that you can make it sound okay using its built in 8-bit DACs, or great using I²S.
Speaking of hardware hacking; you can also get POE/LAN adaptors for the ESP32, if you have free hardware pins left for it.
+1 for the hot garbage piezo, but as OP says the ESP32 has a lot of fun hacking potential and there's plenty of space in the case especially if you remove the battery.
ahh that's incredible. I've attempted similar projects with various devices over time. this looks cool!
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 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.
There's always that person. The only solution is renting your own office (not even home office unless one lives alone).
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.
That may be but they originated in manufacturing, long before NOCs were a thing.
Andon lights!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_light
Our old Plantronics phone headsets had a TRS jack which would connect to an optional status light. It would light up when the headset was on a call.
https://www.headsetsdirect.com/product/poly-busy-light-strai...
My old company used these more recently: https://busylight.com/
Man, Plantronics. That brings back some memories!
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.
I got a giant usb-controlled traffic light at my first job in Germany for a customer project. They just let me keep it after the project finished, which made me repurpose it as a busy light and it worked wonders except that one person who didn't get the hint.
Not exactly this but close: https://www.cleware-shop.de/USB_Tischampel_360
I want more physical devices like this with knobs and switches. Too many things are smooth glass rectangles
I might buy this to use as follows.
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’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.
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.
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.
Sadly for you, I think 6 minute increments (i.e., 0.1 of an hour) might be more common.
> likely to be wildly inaccurate
My gut reaction and prejudiced against all lawyers is it's probably in the law firms interest that these are inaccurate.
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.
If your pay depends on it, you magically become very good at it.
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.
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
Make it a fidget toy and you're onto something.
A big satisfying button to push is welcome.
Looks slick - the backside of the device does look a little "busy" and distracting if I had to stare at it on the top of my monitor.
Nice!
For a home-rolled solution, I use a GE CYNC ST19 Edison Style bulb in a socket right outside my office door. I have it configured through Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/), and then use Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/) on my macbook to make an API call to Home Assistant when the camera state changes.
If my camera turns on/off, so does the light bulb. Works really well for letting my family know I'm busy in meetings.
A bit dystopian turning people into a taxi-like system where you need an indicator to tell if they are vacant or not.
Regardless, I'm struggling to know the audience here. Is it an employee in the office? If that’s the case, it won’t solve any problem because most of the disturbances happen from your boss either calling about something or asking you to join another useless meeting. Your boss won’t care about your status simply because they won’t be collocated in the same office as you most of the time (not that they care about your online status anyway). For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time. At home, you won’t need such a thing. So I don’t know who will find it useful; it looks gimmicky. What’s next, a hat that will turn a green light telling people you are approachable or in the chatting mode, and red when you are not?!
After reading the page, it seems clear it is akin to a recording studio busy signal, well-trodden territory predating computers, and marketed for video conferencing. Neither without target audience, nor a sigil of the fall of interhuman cooperation and communication :)
You have not said what the market is. Recording studios have a solution. And probably don't use pomedero. And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
So who is this device for again?
> You have not said what the market is.
Hmm, you sure? I checked OP, it says "marketed for video conferencing"
> Recording studios have a solution.
Okay.
> And probably don't use pomedero.
*pomodoro
> And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
Okay.
> So who is this device for again?
Video conferencing, ex. the above scenario you laid out
> I'm curious, I'm not just rushing through an attempt to correct something that doesn't need correction. How do they envision it in use?
Here's a link to the site, it has marketing material re: this. https://busy.bar/
For context, we are replying to a comment putting that marketing into question. Therefore the "RTFA" card is not in your deck to play. (I say with a tongue in cheek tone: no flamewar intended!)
In particular GP said:
> For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time.
I think I agree. Back in 2003 my boss said "when my headset is on I am busy". He had to remind everyone a few times. But that worked.
Reductio ad absurdum: If its for recording studios, fine. If not, get off my lawn, its just reinventing having a conversation.
It's telling that both obstinate refusals to not understand what its for end up on unrelated stories about bosses. Let's call it PHB derangement syndrome.
It never seemed likely it was that confusing, it's pretty hard to have been alive from 2020-2024 and claim that there's never any reason for anyone to know anyone else is on a video call. I guess I'm lucky I can take out my Monday scaries via pointing out the obvious, it'd suck to be on the other side and have to pretend I'm stupid.
It’s very pretty; but it’s also a little sad - that there could be demand for a big red flashing IRL “busy” indicator.
If I’m busy and if it happens so often that I can reliably buy a device like this, I would instead prefer to adjust my work environment to not be distracting, and to inform people that they should contact me at some other time.
I guess this may not always be an option.
> sad - that there could be demand for a big red flashing IRL “busy”
Busy is the virture most people want to signal most of the time. Next time someone ask how things are tell people you are not busy, its elicits a similar response to telling people your distant uncle died.
Running under capacity is considered a sin for humans. However it is fine for a server (good for burst performance!).
Lying is also a sin and 90+% of the time when people say they are "busy" they are not.
The mode where it sits on a monitor and displays a status ("on call") is very interesting. I think that could be simplified into a product unto itself -- but it would need to priced at "office toy" level -- so around $20-$40 USD.
I was gonna seriously consider it for $89. But then I noticed it’s $189. Hard pass. It’s a shame because it’s a neat idea. I’d be ok even with just some core functionality
Looks good, but... but... well, it feels a bit like a prostitute's indicator made for the waiting males.
Looks good but it could be half the price and still be overpriced.
Nice product, I built a similar (but less flexible) system for an "ON AIR" sign that I have in my home office, as both my wife and I WFH, it is nice to have a visual indicator when one of us joins a call.
Software for Linux and Mac is here [0]. There's also an ESP32 for the sign, but that part is trivial (MQTT -> LED)
[0]: https://github.com/davidventura/on-air
I'm a sucker for metal things with greebling. The price seems pretty fair for how niche this is; I totally expected Teenage Engineering prices. (Also in the field of greebled single use devices with knobs and the mass of a blunt-force-weapon) Will totally pick one up for the hardware's skookumosity and hackability poetential alone!
Do you mean metal as in the material? Where do you see that?
It definitely looks to be made of a metal. To be fair, I'm just basing that off the texture and specular highlights in the photos. It's pretty similar looking to the iMac's case in one of their photos.
I would actually bet it’s plastic, having a hollow tube-like structure made from metal would be very wasteful because you would have to mill out the entire core (unless it’s cast metal?). Also, the texture looks much coarser than the iMac, there are large „bumps“ on the surface. If it’s really a milled aluminum case, I would at least understand the price, but I would be very surprised. My bet would be a simple injection moulded ABS case.
Messing with this thing sure seems like a great way to stay focused.
The display is a resolution of 72x16, or 1152 px. I counted; there's a couple of frames as the first "busy" mention displays that the splashing animation lights the entire panel.
For comparison, the Ulanzi TC001 mentioned throughout this thread is 32x8, for 256 pixels.
I think if one was wanting to build something like this for themselves that just using a 7" ips display intended for rpi would work as well. With 1024x600 resolution you could draw the chunky pixels if you wanted that aesthetic, and those can be had for like $28.
Is the busy bar's 72x16 LED matrix for sale anywhere with the muted look that one could build something comparable?
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.
On the image which shows the back screen, you can also see a battery icon in the lower right, so that's a very safe bet.
Standard these days is chargeable, have to imagine that is the case here.
Why are the buttons are printed to be readable from the large sign side of the device and not the management side?
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.
Noticed that too -- makes no sense to me. Cool otherwise.
yes this seems a strange choice. The operator is clearly controlling it from the side with the small screen.
I suffer from ADHD and the pomodoro timer part interests me. However, I am not sure if a pomodoro timer would help me. And $200 is an expensive gamble.
Good call on being cautious here. Unfortunately, there isn't anything between this product and the most basic, basic, basic timer for you to test out if the pomodoro method would work for you.
Get a free timer and find out!
An old android phone with no cell service can do the job and costs roughly $0 (plenty of people will happily give one or three away)
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> Use of the terms “Pomodoro®” must be explicitly authorized by us. [1]
1: https://www.pomodorotechnique.com/pomodoro-trademark-guideli...
That battle has been lost. I've header about pomodoros for years and not once about a shitty copyright holder. It's generic now, thank you.
Interesting. Time to create that Pomodoro app I've always wanted to do.
Interestingly, this "official" Pomodoro site doesn't offer a physical timing device on their shop page.
It looks like the inventor of the technique is now based out of Dubai (allergic to taxes? The governments that you lean on to enforce your reigstered trademarks need to be funded somehow).
https://media1.tenor.com/m/t2vQvNA_GlYAAAAC/fille-choque-sho...
It looks very neat, and I love all the physical controls, but it seems like kind of a device from another time where everyone worked in-person all the time. I work a hybrid schedule, with a mostly distributed team, and hotdesk/hotel when I'm in the office, so I don't have the luxury of a physical device to indicate my status, nor much use for one.
That said, I really want something designed like this that I can use.
They need to make a miniature version that I can attach to my headphones because that is my busy indicator.
If I'm at work and need to focus, noise cancelling headphones are a must. If they're off then I'm not busy.
People be so busy they need to buy a hacker-friendly device and build bespoke integrations with it.
Truly, it's so hard for me to not see this as just dressed-up techie-flavored consumerism. If you can't look at your phone to run a timer without getting distracted, I think there's a different problem to solve.
(reminder that Android makes it trivial to not show notifications on the lock screen, or even in the top bar. I see notifications only when I want to.)
> techie-flavored consumerism
I didn't dare comment because it would be against the HN guidelines, but I fully agree. Once the novelty wears off it will turn into electronic waste.
This is primarily to inform other people in the same building as you.
Feels like a problem in search for a solution to me. Although I haven’t worked in an office for a while now, so it could be that I’m not understanding the importance in such setting (or whatever is this device’s target use environment) that can’t be replaced with a sticky note.
I don't work in an office anymore either, but when I did (years ago), I would get constantly interrupted by people walking up to my desk and talking to me. I like talking to people but I also need uninterrupted focus time.
I made something similar with a blink USB light: https://blink1.thingm.com/ . I had a little sign that said "when it's red, I'm busy". And a keyboard shortcut to toggle it from red to green (it just ran a little bash script that invoked the blink CLI). It was duct-taped to my monitor so you could see it from far away.
It worked very well to prevent interruptions from other people walking up to my desk and chatting with me.
I had the same issue when I was in an office and we were getting close to a deadline, so everyone was constantly chatting about this and that to unblock themselves. It's understandable when the rhythm of the office gets to that point that people want answers now, but it would get to ridiculous levels where you couldn't focus for 10 minutes before somebody else came by with a question.
I never got to the point of having a USB light as a semaphore or anything like that, but I really wanted to find and hack a toy traffic light that would indicate if it was a good time to interrupt me or not. So yeah, it was a very real problem.
Geez the creator obviously doesn't think this is a necessity. It's just introducing a little whimsy and fun. Nobody cares if you don't want to buy or use it.
OMG, I love this. The one missing feature: a high quality camera. As soon as I saw the screen mount, I immediately thought of Continuity Camera, which is a great solution for people who want decent video without a full streamer rig.
Waiting room for someone playing doom on it.
Really nice design!
Would love to have one but.. can’t find a use-case for it
I wouldn't have thought this kind of thing would be useful, but after trying a few pomodoro timers I ended up with one (TimeTimer Plus) that is so large that it had the unanticipated benefit of notifying others how long I'll be busy.
However, I will say it depends a great deal on your coworkers/family as to whether they care that you're busy when they want to ask you something.
I quite like the large format for a timer. I have some much lower tech alternative that works wonders for helping keep me focused on tasks: https://www.timetimer.com/
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.
Does this really beat a printed BUSY clipart taped to my screen? It's far from the first product I see like this and the question is always the same.
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.
For some people, maybe. For most people not.
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.
You can also have this update your status on Slack or whatever other relevant platforms support such updates.
If you're frequently on call I guess it's a cool product, but then again nothing a red ON AIR light can't do for a fraction of the price.
can't things just be fun
Not for $189
It does cover people interrupting you to ask “ok but how long will you be busy?” :) unless you want to replace your taped clip art every minute or so.
You can set your clipart to an end time rather than a count down. "Busy until 16:00"
Clever! Thanks you just saved me 200 bucks :)
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.
Good point. I finally know what to do with the old iPads my kids don't use anymore.
The 'Status' in the product name has two meanings, with the second being the standing conveyed by being able to shell out $189 for a pomodoro timer.
Back when I worked in an office and had to do deep thinking without interruptions, I'd string up a bit of yellow police-like tape that I stole from the SGI offices that were closed during Shoreline concerts that said "SILICON GRAPHICS". Worked perfectly.
Hmm shouldn't the button labels be reversed if you're supposed to face it away from you?
In the monitor screenshot it occured to me that you need to choose back or front. But in most open offices you will probably need a 360 dispaly. A circle design that scrolls might work.
Also pomedero breaks are also busy. Having a break is something. Being interupted during that break is no better than being interuppted during the work part.
This design has very strong "2020's TV series based in the Star Wars universe" aesthetic vibes... or is it just me?
Super well done website, and the product itself looks very thoroughly polished.
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
https://github.com/jareklupinski/count-down
google and apple dont make it easy...
This looks retro-sleek. Really cool design.
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 can't seem to tell: is this run off a battery? If so, any specs on the battery? Or is it powered via cable?
Rad device! Not here to gripe about the actual price - and I realize it's counter-intuitive since we say "one hundred dollars" out loud - but in the US, the dollar sign goes before the amount: $189 not 189$
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?
The Ulanzi TC001 might fit the ticket, it's not open source but it's an ESP32 and a bunch of addressable LEDs you can flash through the USB port.
There's an ecosystem of open source firmware for it already.
How can people just spam links of their projects and not get flamed and/or get their posts deleted?
This would take my $200 and just be another distraction of me trying to get $200 worth of value out of it.
I have a “Back in…” analog clock sign on my door. It was a dollar.
I'm a bit dumbfounded by the price tag of $189. Am I wrong?
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.
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.
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.
Can confirm, here’s a small BOM:
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.
no, that's not how much that costs at all lol
Ever been on Aliexpress? I was roughly converting prices from € to $ and adding some spare for tolerance, here’s what I actually paid:
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?
or maybe a repurposed eWaste phone/tablet, or at this price probably a new phone.
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.
They do if you insist on molding them, but for small runs 3D printing ought to provide a baseline maximum cost.
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.
This seems like exactly the price I thought it would be. Maybe a bit cheaper to be honest.
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.
My guess was $150. Producing things costs a surprisingly large amount of money because moqs.
How much do you think it should cost?
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.
Maybe I’m not the target audience but I wouldn’t pay more than $20 for something like this, because I don’t have a burning need for it.
Go build your own for cheaper and see if you can make a living.
Lots of features mentioned there, I wonder how many of those will be ready on launch day and what will be delivered later.
Interesting toy, but in my world none of my friends are going to pay $189 for that. Even when the the dollar sign is on the wrong side.
Out of interest is there anything similar to the Ulanzi TC001 but with a slightly higher resolution.
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.
Juicero, where are you?
Looks like lametric alternative?
This is cool, I've thought of building something like this for years now.
The price is a bit high, but glad to see it in the real world.
Yeah - I feel like everyone who would want one of these would rather build one than pay $189 for it :/
I love this idea.
If it was $100 instead of $189, I would order two (one for me, one for partner) as soon as they were available.
Since 2014 I dream about a product very very similar to this! Happy to see it built!!
Don't make me tap the sign.
"hey what's that flashing box on your monitor?"
"that's my pomodoro timer, it's from a Russian company that specializes in devices that enable various forms of cybercrime. you may have heard of the widespread wave of fraud circa 2019"
"oh neat, no I haven't heard of that"
"hey what's the wifi password again?"
“Enable various forms of cybercrime” seems like a stretch.
If flipper does, so does Nmap and metasploit and Linux and soldering irons.
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.
where do you see that they are Russian? they seem to have a bunch of US Patents, a Delaware postal HQ, and an office in the UK
Most of the staff looks to be Russian: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flipper-devices/people/
The top "Where they live" is UK.
whew. that's a relief
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168388
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.
With all the controls and lights to fiddle with, this Busy Bar hanging off a techbro monitor... is kinda like the Busy Box that was hanging off their crib.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1760749770/fisher-price-busy-bo...
Finally I can put my colleague on Verbal Probation.
Clicking on this page tries to XSS to a domain hosted in Russia (looks like an object storage backend) which is blocked by NoScript.
Cool but not $189 cool.
Where has the practice of putting the $ behind the value come from? I see it happening to £ too. I'm irrationally annoyed by this.
It's standard for Euro amounts and before that for many (most?) European currencies.
The majority of Eurozone countries do put the numbers before the €, but it's not standard across the continent, each country has their own standard and some of them do have the euro sign first.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_the_euro#Writte...
(To save a click: Netherlands plus Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, and Turkey are the Eurozone countries which write €1 - which is also the official way to write it in English. Edit: oops, Turkey should be with England in that it's not a Eurozone country, they have their own Turkish lira, but in their language Euro amounts should be written €10, even though lira amounts are written 10TL.)
take my money
I hit the 'BUY' button while thinking 'how much is this worth, or would people be willing to pay' and settled on about $60-80.
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.
Separate of the product itself...I have to compliment whoever designed the landing page! I'm not a UX/UI/page design expert, but here is what i experience:
* the page loads quick - without overlays, distractions, etc. the page gets to the point, and fast
* immediately i see a description of what the product is...this might sound funny, but tons of product sites lack this most basic thing!
* In addition, the very brief video at the top shows a human hand operating the product...so i know even more about its functions, or at least how to interact with product
* a call-to-action of "BUY" is present and impossible to miss, positioned right after/below the product intro/description
* as i scroll down, the experience is NOT janky...its a smooth scroll down the page
* scrolling down informs me more about the product, including its features, different angles of the physical product (to help denote the features), they even squeeze in that there are developer options - so i'm tipped off that its not only a consumer device, but that it can be integrated with other systems, expanded by devs, etc.!
* they include more product photos in order to show how the product may appear and/or be used in real life
* they even include photo and description of certain features - which serve almost as a very brief user guide, but again, i'm sure the intent is to show off the product's feature set
There probably are other great things about this page that i have not noted here...But, again, kudos to the person/team who designed this! I see many teams that are really intelligent, and might have great products/service, but they don;'t include half the elements present here. Because while i don't have interest in this product, damn, this an extremely compelling experience for their product! Cheers and kudos to all involved!!!!!!!
One thing missing though is the why. It took me a while to realise this is intended for people in open plan offices to communicate when they are disturbable.
Still it's interesting to me as a WFH person to potentially better delineate for myself focus mode.
Agree, except the product price could be right on the buy button. Now the analytics won't tell you whether I clicked on the buy button with an intent to buy, or did I just want to know how much it is.
Agree completely - so much I just had to echo your observations ;-)
I love the aesthetics and simplicity at display here. Very functional and just the right amount of information. Kudos to the Busy Status Bar team from here as well!!
[delayed]
Echoing this, loved the product feature callout diagram. Immediately 'view source' to figure out how it was done.
This site is extremely broken by default, completely unreadable:
https://imgur.com/a/9g1dGxp (default 100% zoom level)
It is totally defective in 100% zoom, I need to manually zoom to 90% to make it be usable/as designed.
It seems to activate cell phone mode for laptop screens.
Edit: I don't get why people are downvoting this (-4 and counting). I enter the site and it is broken, until I change to a non-default zoom level. Valuable feedback IMO
The downvotes are probably because your comment was unnecessarily abrasive, saying things like "unreadable" and "abhorrent."
The feedback is valuable, but the way it's expressed leaves something to be desired.
Fixed it, replaced abhorrent with another descriptor.
the site worked fine on my android phone in vertical mode using Firefox
Finally, the productivity technique named after a $1 clockwork timer gets the fiddly software-and-cloud-based solution it deserves.
too expensive to justify the purchase, otherwise cool and seems to be rather good build quality (at least from videos).
Good but expensive, also does not solve for people behind or side of you.
v2 should replace the matrix display with a Vegas Sphere [1] :-p
--
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjg6-xT6rJg
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Why is everyone complaining on the price tag? It is a product that someone made for profit just like everyone else here is trying to do.
Did Hacker News turn into Daily Deals?
So because everyone wants to make profit, nobody can complain about any prices regardless of how insane they are? What kind of logic is that?
It's honestly not even that expensive considering all the functionality you get and the tech included (which is something HN should understand)
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.
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All these sad people working in offices that need to defend their focus. I will never do that again.
I struggle to imagine the office where this is respected.
Some people actually like being in an office.
I wouldn't mind working hybrid and going to an office 2-3 days/week as long as the commute was under 20 minutes.
I'm planning to use this at home to defend my focus from myself! That idea definitely goes both ways.
The price of interacting with people in person
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!
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Very Les Nessman-ish.
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.