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.
Busy Status Bar
51–60 of 546 posts
Re: Busy Status Bar
#52Where 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.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#53This 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.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#54i 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...
Re: Busy Status Bar
#55Does 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.
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.
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.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#56Where 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.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#57Since 2014 I dream about a product very very similar to this! Happy to see it built!!
Re: Busy Status Bar
#58I 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 but…
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.
> 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.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#59Where 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.
Standard these days is chargeable, have to imagine that is the case here.
Re: Busy Status Bar
#60I'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.
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.