This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design!
The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leaving it marked as “busy”. Within a week or two their coworkers realized that the light was always on busy, so they started asking if they were really busy.
At that point, the entire busy light idea had been defeated.
This product looks more versatile. Being able to automatically tie it to meeting status or set pomodoro timers could make it more interesting.
However, I predict the same fate: Eventually people will realize the light is busy when the person isn’t really busy, and then return to the old habit of interrupting to ask if they’re busy.
Doing it 1-2 days/week is the difference between being able to get some focus time to deliver something of value, and just being an internal search engine.
My job has lots and lots of calls. I am happy to leave most of my calendar open. But most mornings, and at least one full day every 2 weeks is mine, and no, you can't have it, you're not entitled to it, it's important to me I have that time to actually do focus work.
I'm more in project management these days. It makes me laugh when an engineer says "I didn't get any work done today, as it was all meetings" - means I don't work for 20-30 hours/week.
The trick is balance for the role. For engineers it should be a lot more focus time, for PMs and managers it should be a lot more managers, but you should still be able to block out calendars for focus time if you need to - just not all day, every day, forever.
I've never noticed the busy indicator preventing people from asking me this question. And when I message others, the busy light is merely an indicator of how long I may need to wait for a response. My advice to anyone reading is not to be deterred by status lights and calendar blocks.
Yea I always try to block off at least two days a week (ideally 3) of complete focus and move meetinga, conversation etc in other days. Both are useful and are needed
No one who is in engineering would say something like this. I can only conclude your job is auxiliary to engineering. In which case: I don't think someone who isn't an engineer should be talking about what is and isn't possible with respect to how engineers work. It's also a good idea that when engineers do tell you how they work -- not to ignore everything they say. Since Afterall -- you're not actually the one doing the job.
I am a software engineer and most of them I have met throughout my career do not work on tasks that require 24/7 silence. Basic communication is important for every task and if you cant handle that you are simply not suited for the job.
Urgent message! Do you have a moment for a quick call? [It's never quick.]
Urgent message! Hi $yourname.
Urgent message! Hi, so I hit this problem where this-and-this doesn't work. Here's an irrelevant part of the logs. We need to sort this before deployment tomorrow. [After couple of these, eventually your PM tells your team to stop fulfilling such requests from other teams, and instead first ask what the billing code for that is, or if they wouldn't rather file a Trac ticket.]
I have checked your busy / free calendar information and it seems you do nothing around here. We thank you for your service but it is no longer required at this organisation.
I obviously cannot speak for every business in every country, but at least in those I’ve worked at, you’d never get fired for based solely on the number of available slots in your calendar.
I’ve blocked out 2 4 hour blocks for some work mandated sabbaticals for months now. It’s been great! People now remember the days and which block they can’t contact me, and work around it. It’s become such a successful thing that we recommend this to others within my team.
I would probably buy a device like this not to show status to others but to myself;
I use a Life Calendar in Obsidian[1] which shows the weeks elapsed and remaining to my set life expectancy(concept made famous by Tim Urban), it helps me focus with ADHD.
Something like Busy Status bar on the table can help display the life calendar 24x7.
But that will open up the market for a "Seriously Guys, I'm Actually Really" device that can be attached on the left-hand side, and activated when you really mean it.
>This product looks more versatile. Being able to automatically tie it to meeting status or set pomodoro timers could make it more interesting.
Seems this one automatically enables "Busy" if the microphone is activated on the device, though I can't see any reason a similar product couldn't check your calendar
That is certainly an issue. However, in reference to this design, I don't understand the point of having apps like weather and notifications if the large screen that would display such things is meant to face away from you so that others can see your status.
It is an LED screen that I can put anywhere. While the intention is as a busy screen, it can be utilized in a variety of ways. So, ultimately, why not?
I’m constantly looking for a physical worktime chronometer. I’d like to track how much I work, and leave after my 7 hours, or log extra time if I overdo it.
The only things I’ve found were impractical objects, or apps that cost $10-50 per month because they’re designed for consultants who bill their time. Apps are not accurate while one is in meetings, since the computer is off.
The thing is, even for consultants, they get no value from a red “Busy” gadget, but having an object on the table which you can punch to set on which client you’re working, would certainly be useful. More fun than an app, because sometimes you need physical objects.
A stopwatch is a good place to start if you want something readymade and ubiquitous; get a few cheap ones and label them per customer.
When I did that kind of work though, I had a time tracker application that kept track of which window was in the foreground, based on what project I had active in Eclipse (at the time) I could give a rough guesstimate about what project I spent how much time on.
I use an app called aTimeLogger on Android that just pins a little notification with a play/pause and stop button, and a little time counter. When I start working, I hit play. When I take a break, I hit pause.
Been doing this for years. It's great to help me focus on working when I'm actually working, and doing other stuff when I'm not actually working.
Looks like the app is available on iOS too if you're an iPhone user.
I wrote a free app [1] for the Stream Deck (not Steam Deck!), with which I can start Clockify timers with a press of a physical button. Yes, Clockify can do more than just checking in and out, but for the simple use case it's free to use and has an API.
That's easily solved: make that either be "interruptible" or an indicator if you are in "deep focus" or not.
However, one does not always plan in advance to get into deep focus, so I don't really believe this problem is solveable in a useful way. Basically, we need to learn to regain focus quickly and push people away when busy.
Also, async interrupt methods are great when used properly: don't you hate it when someone pings you with "hi" or "hi, I have a question" or similar and waits for your response? Good practice is to ask a full question which allows the other side to respond when they can without interrupting.
You'd need to have it be host specific. Stack overflow? You're researching a problem and still might be elbows deep in a problem. Bluesky or FB? Not so much.
I was being glib and using this as basically a way of illustrating how this isn't really a practical solution. I know when I'm working hard on a difficult the "endless googling bizarre behavior" is when I'm least ready to help field ad hoc requests.
That’s the problem: If the light is always on, or almost always on, then it quickly loses meaning.
Unless the user actually adds green available time at regular intervals throughout the day, people learn that they have to ignore the red busy light and ask.
And then they don't respond to email or slack. Are they missing it? Ignoring it? No one knows. Meanwhile, time sensitive deadlines come and go.
There's no clear, easy protocol that works for everyone, unfortunately. Some people are always going to operate on the 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' model. And I say this as someone who is often in the 'always busy' camp.
If it’s on the record then it would be simple to assign blame on them for the consequences… and then punish accordingly, so it seems like a self correcting issue?
Most employees probably have enough credibility to explain away one or two missed deadlines, but not 5 or 6 in a row without providing actual proof.
I dunno guys, I've become really, really used to the whole "wired in" protocol where if you have fully over-ear headphones on, it means you are either in heads-down coding or writing mode, or you are on a call. It works as long as everyone observes it. But maybe they don't and hence the demand for this product. It just adds another layer of complexity to office politics.
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.
Idea of Flipper Zero was to lower our guard and trust their company with security, while actually shipping hardware with backdoors -- which the Flipper Zero will, for some reason, not be able to detect.
The Flipper Zero is the backdoor, on the Day of Reckoning everyone's Flipper will emit a signal that will drive people into a murderous rage and detonate all nukes while "zhovner", if that is his real name, hides in a mountain lair with a selection of hand-picked people that he has Chosen to repopulate the earth with. Once the billions have perished, his buddy Musk will launch his fleet of Starships full of handpicked seed ships to spread throughout the solar system and galaxy to spread humanity across the universe like a disease.
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. Someone had their iphone stolen. They got a text message on their partner's phone from Apple saying that their phone had been located; they followed the link and ended up on a professional, Apple designed website, showing a map pointing to a distant country where the phone was located, and they prompted the user to type in the phone's pin code in order to lock the phone or something like that.
They only caught themselves while halfway filling in the code, and I'm sure that was captured too.
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.
Same, except the last point, I feel like I've seen that pattern multiple times. And it's not like it's expensive to do (presumably unless you get sued or something).
Well that's not the same is it? They aren't creating a whole new extremely professional product and just saying "made by OtherBrand"; they just cloned a website (probably using an LLM).
So yes except for the last point, and also the other points...
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.
Ahh, the inevitable slippery slope of feature requests. Making hardware for geeks is a tough business because they’ll always say they’d buy it if it had just one or two more features, but by the time you add all of the feature requests they complain that it’s too expensive.
You can get a good CO2 sensor for less than $50 [1]. For large-batch orders the whole device can be less than $50 [2]. Where are you getting an almost $300 addition to the base price?
I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office.
And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.
I think you're missing the obvious play to subsidize the price by making that LLM enabled with a mic and then selling all of that training data. The price could then come down to $19.99.
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.
A version of this that would be useful for WFH or private offices is an 'on air' device that you could mount outside your office door, which means it's not connected to your computer and could potentially run on a battery for a week+ or run on usb power directly.
People want to come in sometimes to access a closet, but they don't know if your in a meeting, so it would also need to detect if your in a meeting, and the microphone being on or off is not enough because people often mute themselves. Calendar access is also not enough because sometimes you start a meeting without a calendar thingy, and also knowing if your 'on air' with an open door can tell them if they have to be worried if they could be on camera if they walk by the door.
It could be a very simple LED, it just needs a good agent on your desktop. Also a 'yellow light' for an upcoming meeting in a couple minutes (so this is where calendar access is useful) or an orange light for camera & microphone off.
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.
Funnily, the way I used to check Keybase profiles is to check Twitter because a blue checkmark there was usually a good indication of them being "the famous person" but thanks to Twitter Blue that feature is no longer usable.
I understand Keybase allows you to link up a bunch of accounts, but it doesn't prevent you from making all of those accounts say you are the CEO/CTO of some company unfortunately.
> but it doesn't prevent you from making all of those accounts say you are the CEO/CTO of some company unfortunately
At least a GitHub profile link can usually be used to validate that this account actually has write access to a GitHub organization, so you can somewhat see it's the right person. Requires them to have pushed any public commits to within that organization though.
> 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."
i'm building a low volume product. if you add the cost unfortunately you will see it's impossible to do something of good quality and low volume with much lower price.
you don't only add the sum of the electronic parts, but materials, r&d, payment for the one who does the assembly, marketing, taxes & accounting, shipping package, refunds and defects, payment for someone to produce it or the usage of your existing equipment, etc. if you add all of these, you will see that it's not cheap.
"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.
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.
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.
It's a great point. For a contemplative learner deeply focused on what they're doing, this is definitely a bad idea. I'm aiming at sort of the opposite kind of learner.
There could be an allowance for time spent not playing music. Keep the timer going for a few minutes after the music has stopped. Require a minimum ratio of music playing time to overall time. So, after a lengthy silence, only playing music will advance the timer.
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.
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.
The Ulanzi TC001 is a great, cheap piece of hardware. I found a second-hand one for $20 and flashed it via USB with https://github.com/lubeda/EspHoMaTriXv2, a more practical firmware if you already have a bunch of ESPHome devices at home.
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! 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.
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.
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!
The “Live on air!” sign that triggers with Zoom (or Slack) is a very common usecase.
I wonder why it’s not better addressed. It needs to 1. be out of the office, on the door, 2. therefore bluetooth, 3. always on, and 4. it’s simple on/off light!
This is a neat idea (and good looking product), but unfortunately the issue is the people who tend to interrupt you in the office ignore all explicit signals in my experience. Wearing noise cancelling headphones is an accepted sign of “in the flow, pls don’t interrupt” yet some folks feel like it doesn’t apply to them. Or they’d just stand next to your desk waiting for your attention. I’m pretty jaded (and probably still recovering from burnout) but these types of people made work unbearable. Usually an executive walking up to ask for the status of something even though there are other ways they can look at the status of something (JIRA, standup, slack updates).
I don't want to disagree with your general statement, because it's correct, but I would like to point out that wearing noise cancelling headphones is not a good signal of ``in the flow, pls don’t interrupt.'' The only thing it's a good signal of is ``I'm listening to something.''
Some people wear headphones simply because they want to listen to music or a podcast while they send/check email. Some people only put them on when they're in a meeting. And yes, some people wear them because they want to be left alone.
There are as many reasons to wear noise cancelling headphones as there are people wearing noise cancelling headphones, and assuming that everyone around you should know what it means to you is as insane as walking up to someone wearing noise cancelling headphones and asking for an update.
> Wearing noise cancelling headphones is an accepted sign of “in the flow, pls don’t interrupt”
Well, someone could always say, sorry I thought those were just regular headphones. :)
Anyway, my philosophy is that I'm being paid by my employer not only to do work, but to help others do their job as well. I WANT to be the person that my co-workers are comfortable walking up to and asking questions even if I am in the middle of something. (Because I'm ALWAYS in the middle of something anyway.) It doesn't take many interactions like this before they start to associate you with the word "indispensable." Which is a good for job security and peer testimonials. And of course making friends.
The general issue with people that don't care is, well, they don't care. The problem with being a reasonable person (or at least being the reasonable person in a certain situation) is that reason stops if the other party is not playing. It rarely helps to keep throwing subtle hints at somebody who just isn't going to cooperate or respect boundaries. It's the juggernaut in human relationships, especially when there's a power imbalance or differing incentives.
It depends on the office culture. The last time I worked in an office, I used a red/green busy signal like this, and people would generally respect it.
It really does depend on office culture. Some people might be more reasonable if you communicate directly. I don't think it would go down well everywhere if you state "Hey! No talking to me if Mr. Smurf is on the table!"... Mr Smurf might have an unfortunate accident sooner rather than later.
Also, what else are standups even for? Everything I've read or seen IRL is some bullshit about using them for teams to "align" or "sync up" or "share progress" or nine other euphemisms for status updates. Let's call a spade a spade.
Oh. Sounds like you're referring to Agile and Standup with capital letters. In my experience people talk about agile-with-a-capital-A and standup-with-a-capital-S and those two don't really match what actually happens in the real world, at least in my experience.
I don't think you have the right to tell your coworkers to leave you alone. Part of working means collaboration and if you're unwilling to do that, you don't belong on a team. You're not doing brain surgery that will permanently alter the life of some helpless patient. you're not meticulously stacking the last card on top of a 10 ft house of cards exhibit where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
You absolutely do. Many coworkers will bug you to ask instead of doing their own research, bug you to chitchat, etc.
They can always book time with you, send an email/IM, etc if there's something they can't resolve on their own.
You have your own deliverables and being interrupted every 10 minutes with inane questions that a web search or a look at the internal wiki/KB would have resolved is not a productive use of anyone's time.
Also, forcing them to wait produces better quality, better researched questions as hopefully they should make some attempt to resolve things on their own.
You had to ask people things when you learned. It's not different now that you're the one with the knowledge. And sometimes people not using the docs means your documentation sucks or needs updating
The problem isn’t people or colleagues asking for help, the problem is feeling entitled to your time exactly when they want it. No one would get any work done if no one had schedules and respected meetings at pre-arranged times.
Also, no one I collaborated with or on my team was ever the issue (except that one time at my first job when someone lied their way into a role, and constantly asked me to do their job). If my team member ever wanted to chat or distract me I had no issue.
It’s the fucking CEO who hasn’t bothered to talk to you for a month and ignore every email walking up to your desk, literally knocking on your table to get you to take your headphones off and give them your attention and saying “hey, when is this new feature gonna be done” when the project management software shows very clearly that everything is on track to ship at X date.
Really this isn’t about collaboration, it’s about people being entitled.
It's about politeness. If somebody took care to produce a sign asking to avoid interruptions, I will think twice whether my inquiry is both urgent and important. If it is not, I will postpone it. If it is, I'll beg for pardon but interrupt.
But no, a context switch required for uttering a few words can absolutely topple the tower of concentration somebody has spent last half an hour building. Certain occupations, engineering among them, require ingesting a large amount of context and making sense of it before productive work can start. My lack of patience with a question which I could answer with 10 minutes of research (or asking someone else) may cost my colleague an hour of lost productivity. Being mindful of this helps everyone, including yourself when the roles are swapped.
All of this entirely depends on your company culture. And for every choice you make (conscious or not) there are consequences.
Perhaps the culture within the company / department / team is to allow interruptions in the name of "collaboration". Hopefully the increased value gained by "collaborating" that way is worth the cost. Some of that cost is time (productivity), some is people literally quitting. Eventually you're left with a company full of people who don't mind being interrupted and I would assume are interrupters themselves, and I'd assume this effect is exponential, causing lower and lower productivity.
As a manager, you can't have this culture and then also complain about the lack of productivity, missed estimates, etc. (Well, you can, but that in turn will increase stress levels and unhappiness and cause more people to quit.)
Your competitor who sees collaboration is possible with planning, proper async communication channels, and some specific culture choices will have a nicer environment and happily hire away your most talented and knowledgeable people.
> where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
After being interrupted, it takes on average over 23 minutes [1] to get back on track. The average time lost is almost 3 hours per day, or 60 hours per month [2].
> You're not meticulously stacking the last card on top of a 10 ft house of cards exhibit where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
You have no idea.
Thank god we have this WFH thing now. I can build this house of cards without anyone interrupting me saying I'm not building a house of cards.
But really, as a software engineer you should not be building a house of cards, right? Surely you should not boldly insist that you never be subjected to collaboration from other members of your team because you are intent on building a system that is in constant danger of collapse.
In my experience, the house of cards is usually debugging, not building. I've had to do some pretty crazy debugging, stepping through deep call stacks frame by frame, keeping track of big data structures as they change along the way. This can take a huge amount of focus that would absolutely be ruined by even a 5 second conversation.
I fully accept that programming is purely a mental task. I choose to think with others and then code in my own time. The tasks are now so short that there is literally no space for someone to interrupt.
I don't think the suggestion is to "never" be subjected to collaboration, but certainly there should be a balance between collaboration and deep work that shouldn't be interrupted if possible.
I hope you're not a manager, because this is horrible guidance. For starters, there are some neurodivergent people who really get thrown off by interruptions, especially if they are really focused on the task at hand. It is entirely unreasonable for you to expect that your coworkers should be available at your beck and call. And you are totally ignoring the fact the countless studies showing that workplace interruptions cost companies money.
If a worker needs disability accommodations they can get them from management. We're not all going to walk on eggshells because someone might be neurodivergent. If they are present in the office they are part of a team and that requires interaction.
Walk on eggshells? Schedule a designated time to talk. It's not that difficult. Are you that disorganized that you need to share your thoughts the second they occur to you? Even for neurotypicals, it takes some time to refocus after interruption. Your approach has been proven to lower productivity and its costs companies serious money.
Displaying a "Busy" signal is a way of implementing "No.". Another part of personal skills is learning when to not interrupt. Implementing an unambiguous signal can help. Learning to not ignore the signal helps. As long as the signal isn't abused or isn't "always on".
That would require them to be interrupted, which would subsequently require them to refocus. Your time is not more important than your coworker's time.
Each interruption is a drain on productivity, which costs the company money. What part about this do you not understand?
It's not a lack of understanding, it's a difference in belief. I believe you are self-aggrandizing by pretending that you're some rain man whose superhuman skills, not found anywhere else or under any conditions other than pretentious "focus mode" - will evaporate if you're forced to be held to standard of common decency. Sorry dude, nothing you work on is that important.
Your belief is based on a misunderstanding. If you have not worked in a context where holding large amounts of details and their relationships in your head does not lead to "losing the picture" when interrupted, you have had a luxury not everyone gets to experience.
Getting "into the flow", or loading/reloading the details into your head typically takes 15 to 30 minutes for sufficiently intricate task or dataset. In such a context, a mere, "Hey, you got a minute?" is costly — more so, if i happens repeatedly during the day.
The importance of my work is determined by the people paying me, not some dipshit on hacker news. And fortunately they value my time enough to allow for deep work hours. It's not that difficult.
Allowing for constant interruptions under the guise of "collaboration" costs companies money. If you're in a management situation, you should know that your attitude will lead to waste.
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.
Surely it would be closer to justice if one were to dispatch the various management gurus and architects who claimed open plan was acceptable and any CEO who agreed with that garbage?
Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!
... or you could have communicated your boundaries & expectations first thing and explicitly instead of doing this weird song and dance and complain on hacker news about it afterwards?
Kinda sounds like I did and they kept ignoring them. Some of us try to approach problems like grownups, even if we leave the details out when they’d break the flow of a story.
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.
I used one of those recently at home since my wife can't see my screen, she's not sure if I'm on a call, listening to music or just there. The built in software sucks, but there are some good open source options https://github.com/JnyJny/busylight also works together with https://mutedeck.com/ for supporting things like Zoom.
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.
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?!
Yes, it's so horrible, just like the on air signs in audio recording rooms from the 1920s are very dystopian, so bad. It's not like everyone is working from home now.
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.
You're thinking grandiosely. It's pretty simple situation thats different from that one.
No one's trying to lay claim to if this individual product "becomes Dropbox", and you're not saying you can build it in a weekend, which is the comment you're referring to.
I think you may be swapping in a bailey of "oh we're arguing about whether this will be "successful"" because the motte of "what is this for, it can't work!?" was obviously stupid, as you've ceded.
The original ftp dropbox comment was about usefulness rather than success IMO. They were saying why is this needed.
With the conraption here. It is not useless, sure, but that is not a high enough bar to use resources to manufacture it or for there to be a market for it. Other than someone mentioned geek consumerism.
It should supplement and facilitate improved office dynamics and less interruptions rather than supplant interaction with proscribed, transactionalized objectification of people. Not everything more efficient should or has to be dystopian.
On the one hand I love single-focus nicely designed hardware. On the other hand I have a https://getfocustimer.com/ gathering dust, because a timer is just easier to set from the computer + screen I am already looking at...
Yes, my experience as well. That's why having an alternate small display (8" or smaller) for your laptop/desktop is better. You can then drag any application on it and use it as a timer or busy sign or whatever. It's way more convenient than an extra device you have to reach and fiddle with.
If the big display is supposed to face away from you towards visitors, why are the controls oriented for them too. Surely you want to control the device, not your visitors?
and why does it have 'how to connect' plastered all over its supposedly user-facing back? why have initial setup stuff end up just being always there? or more annoyingly, exposed for others to fiddle with it? (if it's gonna be used in places with other people around)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Depends what you mean by busy. I use the "free" designation option to plan work in my shared calendar. I am busy but I am also free for a meeting if needed. In server parlence this might be an async batch processing job.
Peope who do 0.8 hours work and collect a full time salary while playing golf and pretending they do 8 are rare I suspect.
At this point I don’t care if it cures cancer. There’s zero chance I’d ever buy it or even look at that page now. We get it. It exists. Stop spamming it.
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
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.
Sheet metal can be wrapped around a mold (round, square, or other) and pressed together, though it's not common. I've got a couple diy electronics protected by "boxes" made of U-shaped steel or aluminum with holes cut for the controls. Alternatively, the technique used to create cardboard boxes also works with sheet metal, where you cut the correct shape out and fold the flaps at set locations; of the metal is thick enough you don't need flaps and it'll hold the shape on its own, and if you want to hide the seams better, use compression or notches.
When looking at the edges, it looks very thick though, no? That doesn’t look like wrapped around sheet metal to me, unless that’s border where some metal is pulled inwards like when making a soda can.
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 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.
Jerks and dorks disrespect others, with the differentiator being intention. If they don't get the hint, then it's probably time for a teachable moment or assertion of boundaries.
Back in 2013ish, I installed an industrial stack light at my desk (https://www.flickr.com/photos/masto/54069311973/) and informed my coworkers that it would save them the trouble of walking all the way across the room to talk to me if I was too busy to be interrupted.
I am not advocating or praising this behavior; I was definitely going through my prima donna phase.
Later I became very timid about talking to people because the company culture was "if I have my headphones on, please don't interrupt me" but everyone had headphones on all the time because the office was a nightmare of noise and distraction.
The ubiquitous slack (or equivalent) channel has a lot of downsides, but when weighed against the alternatives, I think I like it the best. But I'm very conscious of the fact that not everybody's brain has the same attention system. I think that's one of the reasons this little device has generated so many strongly worded comments. It's probably neither the most rude thing ever nor the most helpful thing ever. What would be great for productivity and happiness would be if we could find a way not to force everyone to try to work under the same environmental constraints. (Aspirational: I don't know how to do this.)
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.
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.
We used to have something similar at one of my previous jobs, a piece of paper that was red on one side, if red side was up on the desk, you don't disturb them.
I worked on a trading floor for several years - open floorpan is the right way for a trading operation to be set up because the whole nature of the job is to interrupt and be interrupted throughout the day. Not so for data science / AI / engineering work, unless it's a help desk, IMHO...
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.
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)
This is an instant buy for me. I've been looking for a 'smart timer' that I can interact with programmatically and via Home Assistant for the longest time. I'd resigned myself to either building a terrible version myself or hiring someone to make a bespoke one. I'm super glad you're making this!
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.)
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).
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/
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.
This is an excellent idea. A similar approach, simpler, and cheaper solution for a non-open cube/offices environment is a microcontroller-controlled Andon stack with color-codes for "focusing/DND", "working", "away", "socialization desired", and possibly "about to leave". This makes it possible to scan statuses simply without disturbing people by having to be in visual range of their desk.
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.
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.
what I really want is a LED status display built into the top edge of my laptop screen (visible from opposite side too) that indicates -- when I am on a meeting / when I am muted or unmuted / when my camera is ON. (I should be able to turn them off when i dont need them and also have a manual override to turn them on as well -- so I dont HAVE to indicate my true status publicly when I dont want to -- I might even tie it to work only when on office/home wifi only for instance)
In WFH situations this would be a life saver as other people in the house might walk into your room / across your laptop in view of camera / want to talk to you about random things .... If this kind of busy indicator is present, those people can be a bit more mindful of your immediate situation and avoid distrubance / embarassment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't the large "Start/Pause" button on top invite for any Product Owners or other managers to walk by, hit the button, and start talking to you? Knowing my manager would.
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..
I would buy it but first
i would like to see a youtube video from someone that got his life
change by this and things, i am yet not convinced
is this life changing?
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?
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.
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.
This looks really cool. Would have bought it but the price is a bit too high for me (I live in New Zealand as well so when you convert from USD then add shipping costs etc...).
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: $189 not 189$
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.
Who’s doing the case? Who’s doing the buttons? Who’s gonna put it together? Testing? Programming? Flashing?
How about handling returns?
Packaging? Design for all of the above?
Well that’s the point of a DIY project, you are going to do it (if that’s the kind of project you want). I wasn’t saying you should build this thing yourself because the busy bar is bad, I was just giving some more data to the original commenter who said you can build something similar yourself for much cheaper.
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.
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.
(This isn't necessarily directed at you; just at the last minute thought to look for any top-level posts talking about this aspect. Much thanks for the piggyback! :pray:)
I've nothing but utmost love for Flipper Devices Inc., seeing their approach to PR and as a 1000% happy owner of a Flipper Zero that sits unused 99.99% of the time in my backpack (and boy, am I _extremely_ happy and relieved for the 0.01% when I need it). I would pull the trigger on this in a heartbeat if I had the play-cash.
For those specifically with productivity challenges, it seems to be a good opportunity to remind that there are simple techniques people can try out (even if I find hard to discipline myself to adhere to) like a programmer's anecdote of one of John Carmack's methods[0].
I have personally adapted that technique to buying a $20 (hour-long) sand timer and turning it to its side when I need to pause. Unfortunately, my challenge now is overcoming my reluctance to use it more often, dreading the commitment I am signing myself up for as soon as I start the timer and fear of failure. Alas, it appears that I allow that fear to control me (into shirking responsibility).
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30801421 (unfortunately, original source no longer has this entry published, and archive.org is still offline, so all I have is this HN post to cite :)
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.
I just work from home and leave my Teams status set to "offline" at all times.
I still receive messages, but only reply when contacting me through Teams is the agreed-upon approach. In other words, I simply don't reply to messages that should really be emails or tickets.
Very cool idea but very pricey for what it is. I build a LED 3-4 times bigger with power supply and Rasb Pi for less (and its programmable). However, this is more convenient as a single unit. I could see myself maybe buying this for $30, probably not more.
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.
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.
Although i'm 50/50 on showing the price on the button, i absolutely see your point! I think for devices that are "known" - like, say, a pair of headphones - i suppose i might want to know the price right away...however, for other "unknown" devices, i'd actually like to learn more about the product, its features, maybe use-cases, etc...and as one other person rightly noted even the "Why" i might want/need the product...then again, all of this info could still be shown, and displaying the price shouldn't harm that...so yeah, i gues you're right: they should show the price on the button. :-)
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!!
Its funny you mention the aesthetics, because that's actually what i really liked from the get-go...and then started noticing all this niceties that i listed above (and more i'm sure). Like you, i'm loving the aesthetics!
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
I kind of want to see a parody video in an office where whenever someone walks up to the guy's desk with this thing, he flips it to "Busy" right as they walk up.
Comedy ensues from the awkward reactions and fake apologies.
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!
Fair point given how poorly I worded it. Maybe I could try again.
Yes it's awesome to collaborate with people but if you find a workplace that ignores human factors of knowledge workers, and deters and deep focus, that is a negative signal about that employer. Egs:
* a noisy, open, "pit" with low/no partitions, where sales guys yell into speakerphones right near people heads down
* there are no "focus booths" to make private calls or work
* meeting load is scattered across the day so there's no way to block out working time on calendar
* adversarial IT dept
This kind of environment does not promote work and also increases stress due to context switching (citation needed) and people walking behind you all day in peripheral view (seen a study somewhere). If you find a place like this, your health and career might be better served elsewhere.
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.
For every news story you can find of someone driving down the highway, I can find you at least 10 stories of someone crashing and burning in a multi-car pileup.
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.
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.
This is at least the 3rd version of this product idea that I’ve seen in the past decade. Certainly the nicest design!
The first time I saw this was some friends of friends who were trying to make it into a startup. They quickly discovered that their users liked the idea of a busy light for the office, but didn’t like to update it on or off throughout the day. So after the first few days people just defaulted to leaving it marked as “busy”. Within a week or two their coworkers realized that the light was always on busy, so they started asking if they were really busy.
At that point, the entire busy light idea had been defeated.
This product looks more versatile. Being able to automatically tie it to meeting status or set pomodoro timers could make it more interesting.
However, I predict the same fate: Eventually people will realize the light is busy when the person isn’t really busy, and then return to the old habit of interrupting to ask if they’re busy.
> Eventually people will realize the light is busy when the person isn’t really busy
Like the geniuses that block off their whole day everyday on their calendar or set their Teams status to unavailable all day.
Doing this every day is a problem.
Doing it 1-2 days/week is the difference between being able to get some focus time to deliver something of value, and just being an internal search engine.
My job has lots and lots of calls. I am happy to leave most of my calendar open. But most mornings, and at least one full day every 2 weeks is mine, and no, you can't have it, you're not entitled to it, it's important to me I have that time to actually do focus work.
1 day every 2 weeks?!?!
I'm more in project management these days. It makes me laugh when an engineer says "I didn't get any work done today, as it was all meetings" - means I don't work for 20-30 hours/week.
The trick is balance for the role. For engineers it should be a lot more focus time, for PMs and managers it should be a lot more managers, but you should still be able to block out calendars for focus time if you need to - just not all day, every day, forever.
You’re not an engineer, so that comment isn’t relevant to you.
> the geniuses that block off their whole day everyday on their calendar
as someone who leaves themselves open to hear out others with their "hey do you have a second to check this out" ideas
y'all are missing out
I've never noticed the busy indicator preventing people from asking me this question. And when I message others, the busy light is merely an indicator of how long I may need to wait for a response. My advice to anyone reading is not to be deterred by status lights and calendar blocks.
True, and if someone tries to avoid communication in whatever way I highly doubt they actually work on meaningful tasks...
Or we work on meaningful tasks that require extended periods of focus and concentration.
Yea I always try to block off at least two days a week (ideally 3) of complete focus and move meetinga, conversation etc in other days. Both are useful and are needed
Unless you are some cerrah i highly doubt this.
No one who is in engineering would say something like this. I can only conclude your job is auxiliary to engineering. In which case: I don't think someone who isn't an engineer should be talking about what is and isn't possible with respect to how engineers work. It's also a good idea that when engineers do tell you how they work -- not to ignore everything they say. Since Afterall -- you're not actually the one doing the job.
I am a software engineer and most of them I have met throughout my career do not work on tasks that require 24/7 silence. Basic communication is important for every task and if you cant handle that you are simply not suited for the job.
In my experience a lot of large corporations are absolute distraction machines.
Urgent message! It's time to complete your annual anti-bribery training refresher.
Urgent message! It's World Mental Health Day, and we're rolling out a new employee health and wellbeing policy.
Urgent message! Don't click 'yes' if you're offered an OS upgrade, crowdstrike doesn't support the new version.
Urgent message! All employees are required to complete mandatory training on chair usage. Click here to get started now!
Urgent message! The production website is down, please join the conference call we'd like to ask you about query explain plans.
Urgent message! Would you recognise a phishing attempt? Take 5 minutes to run through this refresher training and keep our corporate data secure.
Urgent message! The lyon office squash club is looking for new members.
A professional needs a strategy to stay productive despite the noise, while not missing the occasional needles in the message haystack.
Also don't forget the cow-orkers:
Urgent message! Do you have a moment for a quick call? [It's never quick.]
Urgent message! Hi $yourname.
Urgent message! Hi, so I hit this problem where this-and-this doesn't work. Here's an irrelevant part of the logs. We need to sort this before deployment tomorrow. [After couple of these, eventually your PM tells your team to stop fulfilling such requests from other teams, and instead first ask what the billing code for that is, or if they wouldn't rather file a Trac ticket.]
Oh come on. There are lots of tasks where not avoiding communication will set you back long time or even prevent you from finishing the task at all.
Absolute skill issue. These kinda tasks usually demand lots of communication
What skill? Skill of ignoring notifications? And a lot of tasks don't require lots of communication. Maybe your tasks do.
I have checked your busy / free calendar information and it seems you do nothing around here. We thank you for your service but it is no longer required at this organisation.
I obviously cannot speak for every business in every country, but at least in those I’ve worked at, you’d never get fired for based solely on the number of available slots in your calendar.
I’ve blocked out 2 4 hour blocks for some work mandated sabbaticals for months now. It’s been great! People now remember the days and which block they can’t contact me, and work around it. It’s become such a successful thing that we recommend this to others within my team.
I would probably buy a device like this not to show status to others but to myself;
I use a Life Calendar in Obsidian[1] which shows the weeks elapsed and remaining to my set life expectancy(concept made famous by Tim Urban), it helps me focus with ADHD.
Something like Busy Status bar on the table can help display the life calendar 24x7.
[1] https://fosstodon.org/@abishek_muthian/113281548403039832
But that will open up the market for a "Seriously Guys, I'm Actually Really" device that can be attached on the left-hand side, and activated when you really mean it.
I see a lot of growth potential in this space.
Just put "literally" before it.
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>This product looks more versatile. Being able to automatically tie it to meeting status or set pomodoro timers could make it more interesting.
Seems this one automatically enables "Busy" if the microphone is activated on the device, though I can't see any reason a similar product couldn't check your calendar
That is certainly an issue. However, in reference to this design, I don't understand the point of having apps like weather and notifications if the large screen that would display such things is meant to face away from you so that others can see your status.
It is an LED screen that I can put anywhere. While the intention is as a busy screen, it can be utilized in a variety of ways. So, ultimately, why not?
Tbf if people isolate themselves like that their manager should have a word with them or their job description needs to be updated.
I’m constantly looking for a physical worktime chronometer. I’d like to track how much I work, and leave after my 7 hours, or log extra time if I overdo it.
The only things I’ve found were impractical objects, or apps that cost $10-50 per month because they’re designed for consultants who bill their time. Apps are not accurate while one is in meetings, since the computer is off.
The thing is, even for consultants, they get no value from a red “Busy” gadget, but having an object on the table which you can punch to set on which client you’re working, would certainly be useful. More fun than an app, because sometimes you need physical objects.
I’d just like to clock in and clock out.
A stopwatch is a good place to start if you want something readymade and ubiquitous; get a few cheap ones and label them per customer.
When I did that kind of work though, I had a time tracker application that kept track of which window was in the foreground, based on what project I had active in Eclipse (at the time) I could give a rough guesstimate about what project I spent how much time on.
I use an app called aTimeLogger on Android that just pins a little notification with a play/pause and stop button, and a little time counter. When I start working, I hit play. When I take a break, I hit pause.
Been doing this for years. It's great to help me focus on working when I'm actually working, and doing other stuff when I'm not actually working.
Looks like the app is available on iOS too if you're an iPhone user.
Maybe Timery? I've never tried it since I learned about it while laid off but I will definitely use it when I get a job.
https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-time-tracking-app/
I wrote a free app [1] for the Stream Deck (not Steam Deck!), with which I can start Clockify timers with a press of a physical button. Yes, Clockify can do more than just checking in and out, but for the simple use case it's free to use and has an API.
[1] https://github.com/eXpl0it3r/streamdeck-clockify
Just give me lockable cubicle please.
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Perhaps the real solution is to default to "busy" and only show "available" on a trigger, like web-browsing or staring into space.
Nobody will mark oneself as not busy, either because the management might be taking note or one truly doesn't make time to be open to more work.
It looks like to me that due to previous solutions, people try to improve upon in the same domain. May be the premise of the solution is wrong.
That's easily solved: make that either be "interruptible" or an indicator if you are in "deep focus" or not.
However, one does not always plan in advance to get into deep focus, so I don't really believe this problem is solveable in a useful way. Basically, we need to learn to regain focus quickly and push people away when busy.
Also, async interrupt methods are great when used properly: don't you hate it when someone pings you with "hi" or "hi, I have a question" or similar and waits for your response? Good practice is to ask a full question which allows the other side to respond when they can without interrupting.
Staring into space is what I do when thinking. Lots of my job is thinking. Maybe that's why folk ignored my busy indicator.
Staring into space is when I am busiest of all.
There is a lot of space to stare at!
You'd need to have it be host specific. Stack overflow? You're researching a problem and still might be elbows deep in a problem. Bluesky or FB? Not so much.
What if your developer community is in those spaces, or you work for them though?
I was being glib and using this as basically a way of illustrating how this isn't really a practical solution. I know when I'm working hard on a difficult the "endless googling bizarre behavior" is when I'm least ready to help field ad hoc requests.
That seems like an easy fix: Tell visitors to look at the light.
That’s the problem: If the light is always on, or almost always on, then it quickly loses meaning.
Unless the user actually adds green available time at regular intervals throughout the day, people learn that they have to ignore the red busy light and ask.
Or the person is always busy, and to contact them a person should use slack, email or some other method.
And then they don't respond to email or slack. Are they missing it? Ignoring it? No one knows. Meanwhile, time sensitive deadlines come and go.
There's no clear, easy protocol that works for everyone, unfortunately. Some people are always going to operate on the 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' model. And I say this as someone who is often in the 'always busy' camp.
If it’s on the record then it would be simple to assign blame on them for the consequences… and then punish accordingly, so it seems like a self correcting issue?
Most employees probably have enough credibility to explain away one or two missed deadlines, but not 5 or 6 in a row without providing actual proof.
I dunno guys, I've become really, really used to the whole "wired in" protocol where if you have fully over-ear headphones on, it means you are either in heads-down coding or writing mode, or you are on a call. It works as long as everyone observes it. But maybe they don't and hence the demand for this product. It just adds another layer of complexity to office politics.
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Sounds like a fast to way to get nicknamed “Larry” around the office.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dont-make-me-tap-the-sign
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.
Ahh... I wish Keybase had taken off and not been gobbled up by Zoom. It had so much promise with things like this.
Hi, I am the CEO of Keybase and i can assure you we are working on features that will make this a reality
LOL
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)
Even sneakier - he designed and built an entire company around the Flipper Zero just to be able to fake this. For real.
Idea of Flipper Zero was to lower our guard and trust their company with security, while actually shipping hardware with backdoors -- which the Flipper Zero will, for some reason, not be able to detect.
The Flipper Zero is the backdoor, on the Day of Reckoning everyone's Flipper will emit a signal that will drive people into a murderous rage and detonate all nukes while "zhovner", if that is his real name, hides in a mountain lair with a selection of hand-picked people that he has Chosen to repopulate the earth with. Once the billions have perished, his buddy Musk will launch his fleet of Starships full of handpicked seed ships to spread throughout the solar system and galaxy to spread humanity across the universe like a disease.
or something.
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. Someone had their iphone stolen. They got a text message on their partner's phone from Apple saying that their phone had been located; they followed the link and ended up on a professional, Apple designed website, showing a map pointing to a distant country where the phone was located, and they prompted the user to type in the phone's pin code in order to lock the phone or something like that.
They only caught themselves while halfway filling in the code, and I'm sure that was captured too.
Don't underestimate organized crime.
Interesting, but totally unrelated.
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.
Same, except the last point, I feel like I've seen that pattern multiple times. And it's not like it's expensive to do (presumably unless you get sued or something).
Well that's not the same is it? They aren't creating a whole new extremely professional product and just saying "made by OtherBrand"; they just cloned a website (probably using an LLM).
So yes except for the last point, and also the other points...
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
I’ve found a CO2 measure for 16€ at my supermarket. Of course I’ll never know whether it’s accurate ;)
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.
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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
Maybe aranet4 device as add-on? It does BTLE.
Ahh, the inevitable slippery slope of feature requests. Making hardware for geeks is a tough business because they’ll always say they’d buy it if it had just one or two more features, but by the time you add all of the feature requests they complain that it’s too expensive.
> but by the time you add all of the feature requests they complain that it’s too expensive.
Or that it’s too complicated. Then another startup comes along to “simplify” the product and the cycle begins anew.
Also add PM (Particulate Matter) and VOC.
CO2 sensor is too expensive. No one will buy this device for $500
You can get a good CO2 sensor for less than $50 [1]. For large-batch orders the whole device can be less than $50 [2]. Where are you getting an almost $300 addition to the base price?
[1] https://sensirion.com/products/catalog/SCD30
[2] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vindstyrka-air-quality-sensor-s...
If there are GPIOs let the market do it.
so now we're talking a $500 device? they're already asking ~$200 for a feature stop watch
Why stop at a $500 device?
I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office.
And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.
I think you're missing the obvious play to subsidize the price by making that LLM enabled with a mic and then selling all of that training data. The price could then come down to $19.99.
I forgot the phased 32-element microphone array! How silly of me.
It will listen in all directions at once, 24/7/365, and send the recordings home to mother.
If done right, that should keep the end-user price below $10.
The sub $10 unit will also include cameras for the additional training data
At some point, it starts to make sense to pay people to take these things.
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.)
A version of this that would be useful for WFH or private offices is an 'on air' device that you could mount outside your office door, which means it's not connected to your computer and could potentially run on a battery for a week+ or run on usb power directly.
People want to come in sometimes to access a closet, but they don't know if your in a meeting, so it would also need to detect if your in a meeting, and the microphone being on or off is not enough because people often mute themselves. Calendar access is also not enough because sometimes you start a meeting without a calendar thingy, and also knowing if your 'on air' with an open door can tell them if they have to be worried if they could be on camera if they walk by the door.
It could be a very simple LED, it just needs a good agent on your desktop. Also a 'yellow light' for an upcoming meeting in a couple minutes (so this is where calendar access is useful) or an orange light for camera & microphone off.
It seems like that's already supported considering there's mobile apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipperdev...
They're referenced on the second picture on the site, with the backside of the device that shows you how to control it.
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.
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! :)
Funnily, the way I used to check Keybase profiles is to check Twitter because a blue checkmark there was usually a good indication of them being "the famous person" but thanks to Twitter Blue that feature is no longer usable.
I understand Keybase allows you to link up a bunch of accounts, but it doesn't prevent you from making all of those accounts say you are the CEO/CTO of some company unfortunately.
> but it doesn't prevent you from making all of those accounts say you are the CEO/CTO of some company unfortunately
At least a GitHub profile link can usually be used to validate that this account actually has write access to a GitHub organization, so you can somewhat see it's the right person. Requires them to have pushed any public commits to within that organization though.
Fair point, yeah.
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.
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This is better and more useful than the FlipperOne, I think.
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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©©©©©©©©
I just got 8 of those with no authorization
Have you not heard of responsible disclosure!?
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?
i'm building a low volume product. if you add the cost unfortunately you will see it's impossible to do something of good quality and low volume with much lower price.
you don't only add the sum of the electronic parts, but materials, r&d, payment for the one who does the assembly, marketing, taxes & accounting, shipping package, refunds and defects, payment for someone to produce it or the usage of your existing equipment, etc. if you add all of these, you will see that it's not cheap.
"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.
Which an FFT on an ESP32-S3 with it's Xtensa LX7 vector extensions can be quite fast
https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/16asjx9/esp32s3_do...
The actual github : https://github.com/stolk/little_kiss_fft
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.
For the non-adversary who wants something similar in nature, that might help them practice, why not? Not everyone is trying to cheat.
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.
It's a great point. For a contemplative learner deeply focused on what they're doing, this is definitely a bad idea. I'm aiming at sort of the opposite kind of learner.
There could be an allowance for time spent not playing music. Keep the timer going for a few minutes after the music has stopped. Require a minimum ratio of music playing time to overall time. So, after a lengthy silence, only playing music will advance the timer.
But, yeah, it may or may not be helpful.
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.
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.
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.
I’d like it to have buttons (the apps Ulanzi mention are view-only).
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The Ulanzi TC001 is a great, cheap piece of hardware. I found a second-hand one for $20 and flashed it via USB with https://github.com/lubeda/EspHoMaTriXv2, a more practical firmware if you already have a bunch of ESPHome devices at home.
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! 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.
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.
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.
Thank you! This is a nice rabbit hole to go down to. I've previously thought about building one myself, but this is probably way nicer.
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!
The “Live on air!” sign that triggers with Zoom (or Slack) is a very common usecase.
I wonder why it’s not better addressed. It needs to 1. be out of the office, on the door, 2. therefore bluetooth, 3. always on, and 4. it’s simple on/off light!
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That looks amazing! I'm ordering one, thanks for the tip!
I have 2 of them and love them, blueforcer firmware supports home assistant and I can mix it with automations
ahh that's incredible. I've attempted similar projects with various devices over time. this looks cool!
This is a neat idea (and good looking product), but unfortunately the issue is the people who tend to interrupt you in the office ignore all explicit signals in my experience. Wearing noise cancelling headphones is an accepted sign of “in the flow, pls don’t interrupt” yet some folks feel like it doesn’t apply to them. Or they’d just stand next to your desk waiting for your attention. I’m pretty jaded (and probably still recovering from burnout) but these types of people made work unbearable. Usually an executive walking up to ask for the status of something even though there are other ways they can look at the status of something (JIRA, standup, slack updates).
I don't want to disagree with your general statement, because it's correct, but I would like to point out that wearing noise cancelling headphones is not a good signal of ``in the flow, pls don’t interrupt.'' The only thing it's a good signal of is ``I'm listening to something.''
Some people wear headphones simply because they want to listen to music or a podcast while they send/check email. Some people only put them on when they're in a meeting. And yes, some people wear them because they want to be left alone.
There are as many reasons to wear noise cancelling headphones as there are people wearing noise cancelling headphones, and assuming that everyone around you should know what it means to you is as insane as walking up to someone wearing noise cancelling headphones and asking for an update.
Some people also wear them the entire day.
> Wearing noise cancelling headphones is an accepted sign of “in the flow, pls don’t interrupt”
Well, someone could always say, sorry I thought those were just regular headphones. :)
Anyway, my philosophy is that I'm being paid by my employer not only to do work, but to help others do their job as well. I WANT to be the person that my co-workers are comfortable walking up to and asking questions even if I am in the middle of something. (Because I'm ALWAYS in the middle of something anyway.) It doesn't take many interactions like this before they start to associate you with the word "indispensable." Which is a good for job security and peer testimonials. And of course making friends.
The flip side is it’s bad for actually getting focused work done.
The general issue with people that don't care is, well, they don't care. The problem with being a reasonable person (or at least being the reasonable person in a certain situation) is that reason stops if the other party is not playing. It rarely helps to keep throwing subtle hints at somebody who just isn't going to cooperate or respect boundaries. It's the juggernaut in human relationships, especially when there's a power imbalance or differing incentives.
It depends on the office culture. The last time I worked in an office, I used a red/green busy signal like this, and people would generally respect it.
It really does depend on office culture. Some people might be more reasonable if you communicate directly. I don't think it would go down well everywhere if you state "Hey! No talking to me if Mr. Smurf is on the table!"... Mr Smurf might have an unfortunate accident sooner rather than later.
There is a special place in hell for PMs who can't wait for daily standup to get your status update.
There is an even more special place in hell for PMs who schedule an additional regular status update meeting.
Wait, I thought PMs were explicitly not allowed in standups, and that standups are explicitly not status meetings.
You should tell my PM and manager this.
Also, what else are standups even for? Everything I've read or seen IRL is some bullshit about using them for teams to "align" or "sync up" or "share progress" or nine other euphemisms for status updates. Let's call a spade a spade.
Oh. Sounds like you're referring to Agile and Standup with capital letters. In my experience people talk about agile-with-a-capital-A and standup-with-a-capital-S and those two don't really match what actually happens in the real world, at least in my experience.
And poker planning is just a tool that is used internally in the team to fill in the sprint, and not promises to sales
Standups nearly always involve reporting status. At MPOW they involve short discussions on what may be blocking and who / what could help.
I don't think you have the right to tell your coworkers to leave you alone. Part of working means collaboration and if you're unwilling to do that, you don't belong on a team. You're not doing brain surgery that will permanently alter the life of some helpless patient. you're not meticulously stacking the last card on top of a 10 ft house of cards exhibit where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
You absolutely do. Many coworkers will bug you to ask instead of doing their own research, bug you to chitchat, etc.
They can always book time with you, send an email/IM, etc if there's something they can't resolve on their own.
You have your own deliverables and being interrupted every 10 minutes with inane questions that a web search or a look at the internal wiki/KB would have resolved is not a productive use of anyone's time.
Also, forcing them to wait produces better quality, better researched questions as hopefully they should make some attempt to resolve things on their own.
You had to ask people things when you learned. It's not different now that you're the one with the knowledge. And sometimes people not using the docs means your documentation sucks or needs updating
The problem isn’t people or colleagues asking for help, the problem is feeling entitled to your time exactly when they want it. No one would get any work done if no one had schedules and respected meetings at pre-arranged times.
Also, no one I collaborated with or on my team was ever the issue (except that one time at my first job when someone lied their way into a role, and constantly asked me to do their job). If my team member ever wanted to chat or distract me I had no issue.
It’s the fucking CEO who hasn’t bothered to talk to you for a month and ignore every email walking up to your desk, literally knocking on your table to get you to take your headphones off and give them your attention and saying “hey, when is this new feature gonna be done” when the project management software shows very clearly that everything is on track to ship at X date.
Really this isn’t about collaboration, it’s about people being entitled.
It's about politeness. If somebody took care to produce a sign asking to avoid interruptions, I will think twice whether my inquiry is both urgent and important. If it is not, I will postpone it. If it is, I'll beg for pardon but interrupt.
But no, a context switch required for uttering a few words can absolutely topple the tower of concentration somebody has spent last half an hour building. Certain occupations, engineering among them, require ingesting a large amount of context and making sense of it before productive work can start. My lack of patience with a question which I could answer with 10 minutes of research (or asking someone else) may cost my colleague an hour of lost productivity. Being mindful of this helps everyone, including yourself when the roles are swapped.
All of this entirely depends on your company culture. And for every choice you make (conscious or not) there are consequences.
Perhaps the culture within the company / department / team is to allow interruptions in the name of "collaboration". Hopefully the increased value gained by "collaborating" that way is worth the cost. Some of that cost is time (productivity), some is people literally quitting. Eventually you're left with a company full of people who don't mind being interrupted and I would assume are interrupters themselves, and I'd assume this effect is exponential, causing lower and lower productivity.
As a manager, you can't have this culture and then also complain about the lack of productivity, missed estimates, etc. (Well, you can, but that in turn will increase stress levels and unhappiness and cause more people to quit.)
Your competitor who sees collaboration is possible with planning, proper async communication channels, and some specific culture choices will have a nicer environment and happily hire away your most talented and knowledgeable people.
> where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
After being interrupted, it takes on average over 23 minutes [1] to get back on track. The average time lost is almost 3 hours per day, or 60 hours per month [2].
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/944128/worker-interrupted-cost-t...
[2] https://www.talkboxbooth.com/post/shocking-cost-workplace-di...
> You're not meticulously stacking the last card on top of a 10 ft house of cards exhibit where tens of hours of work will be completely lost if your concentration strays to show your face to another human being and utter a few words.
You have no idea.
Thank god we have this WFH thing now. I can build this house of cards without anyone interrupting me saying I'm not building a house of cards.
But really, as a software engineer you should not be building a house of cards, right? Surely you should not boldly insist that you never be subjected to collaboration from other members of your team because you are intent on building a system that is in constant danger of collapse.
In my experience, the house of cards is usually debugging, not building. I've had to do some pretty crazy debugging, stepping through deep call stacks frame by frame, keeping track of big data structures as they change along the way. This can take a huge amount of focus that would absolutely be ruined by even a 5 second conversation.
With my experience now..
I fully accept that programming is purely a mental task. I choose to think with others and then code in my own time. The tasks are now so short that there is literally no space for someone to interrupt.
Everything else is productivity theater.
I don't think the suggestion is to "never" be subjected to collaboration, but certainly there should be a balance between collaboration and deep work that shouldn't be interrupted if possible.
I hope you're not a manager, because this is horrible guidance. For starters, there are some neurodivergent people who really get thrown off by interruptions, especially if they are really focused on the task at hand. It is entirely unreasonable for you to expect that your coworkers should be available at your beck and call. And you are totally ignoring the fact the countless studies showing that workplace interruptions cost companies money.
If a worker needs disability accommodations they can get them from management. We're not all going to walk on eggshells because someone might be neurodivergent. If they are present in the office they are part of a team and that requires interaction.
Walk on eggshells? Schedule a designated time to talk. It's not that difficult. Are you that disorganized that you need to share your thoughts the second they occur to you? Even for neurotypicals, it takes some time to refocus after interruption. Your approach has been proven to lower productivity and its costs companies serious money.
Tell the person who is trying to talk that you're busy and you'll get back to them later. It's part of the interpersonal skill of learning to say no.
Displaying a "Busy" signal is a way of implementing "No.". Another part of personal skills is learning when to not interrupt. Implementing an unambiguous signal can help. Learning to not ignore the signal helps. As long as the signal isn't abused or isn't "always on".
That would require them to be interrupted, which would subsequently require them to refocus. Your time is not more important than your coworker's time.
Each interruption is a drain on productivity, which costs the company money. What part about this do you not understand?
It's not a lack of understanding, it's a difference in belief. I believe you are self-aggrandizing by pretending that you're some rain man whose superhuman skills, not found anywhere else or under any conditions other than pretentious "focus mode" - will evaporate if you're forced to be held to standard of common decency. Sorry dude, nothing you work on is that important.
Your belief is based on a misunderstanding. If you have not worked in a context where holding large amounts of details and their relationships in your head does not lead to "losing the picture" when interrupted, you have had a luxury not everyone gets to experience.
Getting "into the flow", or loading/reloading the details into your head typically takes 15 to 30 minutes for sufficiently intricate task or dataset. In such a context, a mere, "Hey, you got a minute?" is costly — more so, if i happens repeatedly during the day.
Treasure your freedom from such difficulties.
The importance of my work is determined by the people paying me, not some dipshit on hacker news. And fortunately they value my time enough to allow for deep work hours. It's not that difficult.
Allowing for constant interruptions under the guise of "collaboration" costs companies money. If you're in a management situation, you should know that your attitude will lead to waste.
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.
Got to love that productive office work for us swes.
There's always that person. The only solution is renting your own office (not even home office unless one lives alone).
Murder is always an option. If you can get one thought worker on the jury, you'd never be convicted.
Surely it would be closer to justice if one were to dispatch the various management gurus and architects who claimed open plan was acceptable and any CEO who agreed with that garbage?
Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!
Can one volunteer for jury duty? Asking for a friend.
... or you could have communicated your boundaries & expectations first thing and explicitly instead of doing this weird song and dance and complain on hacker news about it afterwards?
Kinda sounds like I did and they kept ignoring them. Some of us try to approach problems like grownups, even if we leave the details out when they’d break the flow of a story.
> We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.
Let me guess: you did absolutely nothing?
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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/
I used one of those recently at home since my wife can't see my screen, she's not sure if I'm on a call, listening to music or just there. The built in software sucks, but there are some good open source options https://github.com/JnyJny/busylight also works together with https://mutedeck.com/ for supporting things like Zoom.
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one comment to promote your product is enough. we don't need 26 (yes i counted)
You know if you click on the timestamp on a comment there is a flag button?
Also you are right comments like this are very annoying. I'm still surprised that HN doesn't have some kind of spam filter or rate limit
I’m focusing on flagging these.
Up to 47 now. Didn't notice it was all one guy until you posted this.
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.
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?!
Yes, it's so horrible, just like the on air signs in audio recording rooms from the 1920s are very dystopian, so bad. It's not like everyone is working from home now.
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.
I might be doing the famous "just use ftp" to dropbox. But I highly doubt it for this product.
You're thinking grandiosely. It's pretty simple situation thats different from that one.
No one's trying to lay claim to if this individual product "becomes Dropbox", and you're not saying you can build it in a weekend, which is the comment you're referring to.
I think you may be swapping in a bailey of "oh we're arguing about whether this will be "successful"" because the motte of "what is this for, it can't work!?" was obviously stupid, as you've ceded.
The original ftp dropbox comment was about usefulness rather than success IMO. They were saying why is this needed.
With the conraption here. It is not useless, sure, but that is not a high enough bar to use resources to manufacture it or for there to be a market for it. Other than someone mentioned geek consumerism.
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People are conflating the problem space and this solution.
This doesn't let you do deep work! Probably the opposite, it is a gimmick that will attract a nerd mob to your desk to ooh over it.
You're trolling and that's not cool
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It should supplement and facilitate improved office dynamics and less interruptions rather than supplant interaction with proscribed, transactionalized objectification of people. Not everything more efficient should or has to be dystopian.
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First the Nintendo alarm clock and now a sign that says "busy" - But it's hackable!
You nerds will buy anything
On the one hand I love single-focus nicely designed hardware. On the other hand I have a https://getfocustimer.com/ gathering dust, because a timer is just easier to set from the computer + screen I am already looking at...
The only product in this category I still use on the regular is https://boomkat.com/products/buddha-machine-special-edition-... and its predecessors.
Yes, my experience as well. That's why having an alternate small display (8" or smaller) for your laptop/desktop is better. You can then drag any application on it and use it as a timer or busy sign or whatever. It's way more convenient than an extra device you have to reach and fiddle with.
Yes! What are you gonna make?
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Yeah... You're right
If the big display is supposed to face away from you towards visitors, why are the controls oriented for them too. Surely you want to control the device, not your visitors?
and why does it have 'how to connect' plastered all over its supposedly user-facing back? why have initial setup stuff end up just being always there? or more annoyingly, exposed for others to fiddle with it? (if it's gonna be used in places with other people around)
Agreed. This is dumb AF.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Depends what you mean by busy. I use the "free" designation option to plan work in my shared calendar. I am busy but I am also free for a meeting if needed. In server parlence this might be an async batch processing job.
Peope who do 0.8 hours work and collect a full time salary while playing golf and pretending they do 8 are rare I suspect.
I am talking about the "cult of bussyness" form of busy, most people can get their 8 hour day done by lunch even at a leisurly pace.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/busy-work-productiv...
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At this point I don’t care if it cures cancer. There’s zero chance I’d ever buy it or even look at that page now. We get it. It exists. Stop spamming it.
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
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I’ve a Blynclight that basically does what you describe. However the integration with Teams is kind of flaky.
https://store.embrava.com/products/blynclight-standard
This looks really nice!
I hacked together a script to accomplish a similar thing.
In my case, I only consider myself “busy” when my camera is on, meaning no one should enter my office.
https://github.com/styfle/bluetooth-lightbulb-alert
When accessing this site I’m seeing a request to https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/e97b1e25-0407-48a5-988... which is getting blocked by my firewall.
Messing with this thing sure seems like a great way to stay focused.
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.
Sheet metal can be wrapped around a mold (round, square, or other) and pressed together, though it's not common. I've got a couple diy electronics protected by "boxes" made of U-shaped steel or aluminum with holes cut for the controls. Alternatively, the technique used to create cardboard boxes also works with sheet metal, where you cut the correct shape out and fold the flaps at set locations; of the metal is thick enough you don't need flaps and it'll hold the shape on its own, and if you want to hide the seams better, use compression or notches.
When looking at the edges, it looks very thick though, no? That doesn’t look like wrapped around sheet metal to me, unless that’s border where some metal is pulled inwards like when making a soda can.
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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.
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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 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
Jerks and dorks disrespect others, with the differentiator being intention. If they don't get the hint, then it's probably time for a teachable moment or assertion of boundaries.
Back in 2013ish, I installed an industrial stack light at my desk (https://www.flickr.com/photos/masto/54069311973/) and informed my coworkers that it would save them the trouble of walking all the way across the room to talk to me if I was too busy to be interrupted.
I am not advocating or praising this behavior; I was definitely going through my prima donna phase.
Later I became very timid about talking to people because the company culture was "if I have my headphones on, please don't interrupt me" but everyone had headphones on all the time because the office was a nightmare of noise and distraction.
The ubiquitous slack (or equivalent) channel has a lot of downsides, but when weighed against the alternatives, I think I like it the best. But I'm very conscious of the fact that not everybody's brain has the same attention system. I think that's one of the reasons this little device has generated so many strongly worded comments. It's probably neither the most rude thing ever nor the most helpful thing ever. What would be great for productivity and happiness would be if we could find a way not to force everyone to try to work under the same environmental constraints. (Aspirational: I don't know how to do this.)
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.
Standard these days is chargeable, have to imagine that is the case here.
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.
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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?
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We used to have something similar at one of my previous jobs, a piece of paper that was red on one side, if red side was up on the desk, you don't disturb them.
Cool product! Still think Joel Spolsky was right that coders and engineers do best when they have an office with a door that closes though. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/19/where-do-these-peo...
I worked on a trading floor for several years - open floorpan is the right way for a trading operation to be set up because the whole nature of the job is to interrupt and be interrupted throughout the day. Not so for data science / AI / engineering work, unless it's a help desk, IMHO...
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?
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
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This is an instant buy for me. I've been looking for a 'smart timer' that I can interact with programmatically and via Home Assistant for the longest time. I'd resigned myself to either building a terrible version myself or hiring someone to make a bespoke one. I'm super glad you're making this!
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.)
> 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...
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/
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.)
This is primarily to inform other people in the same building as you.
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> 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.
> If you can't look at your phone to run a timer without getting distracted, I think there's a different problem to solve.
Say more? What is the different problem?
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.
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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.
Oh ho, you got me. Bruh, if I was here rallying against consumerism with any thought that it would matter, well, I'd be an idiot.
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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.
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.
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This is an excellent idea. A similar approach, simpler, and cheaper solution for a non-open cube/offices environment is a microcontroller-controlled Andon stack with color-codes for "focusing/DND", "working", "away", "socialization desired", and possibly "about to leave". This makes it possible to scan statuses simply without disturbing people by having to be in visual range of their desk.
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.
Perfect!
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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.
slightly off topic but ...
what I really want is a LED status display built into the top edge of my laptop screen (visible from opposite side too) that indicates -- when I am on a meeting / when I am muted or unmuted / when my camera is ON. (I should be able to turn them off when i dont need them and also have a manual override to turn them on as well -- so I dont HAVE to indicate my true status publicly when I dont want to -- I might even tie it to work only when on office/home wifi only for instance)
In WFH situations this would be a life saver as other people in the house might walk into your room / across your laptop in view of camera / want to talk to you about random things .... If this kind of busy indicator is present, those people can be a bit more mindful of your immediate situation and avoid distrubance / embarassment.
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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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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I want more physical devices like this with knobs and switches. Too many things are smooth glass rectangles
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Doesn't the large "Start/Pause" button on top invite for any Product Owners or other managers to walk by, hit the button, and start talking to you? Knowing my manager would.
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?
It's missing a credit card slot for paid interruptions ;)
I would buy it but first i would like to see a youtube video from someone that got his life change by this and things, i am yet not convinced is this life changing?
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.
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.
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Hmm shouldn't the button labels be reversed if you're supposed to face it away from you?
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.
Back in the day at sparkfun we just wired up a safety beacon to an Ardoino and called it a day.
Nyan cat does not add any value.
Design is fantastic, every single detail is near-perfect. Unfortunately, the price tag is too high for this solution.
This looks really cool. Would have bought it but the price is a bit too high for me (I live in New Zealand as well so when you convert from USD then add shipping costs etc...).
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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: $189 not 189$
Seems more like a novelty item than something to be used in an actual office.
Would love to code/configure it with a middle finger emoji if I am in a call :)
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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?
Who’s doing the case? Who’s doing the buttons? Who’s gonna put it together? Testing? Programming? Flashing? How about handling returns? Packaging? Design for all of the above?
Well that’s the point of a DIY project, you are going to do it (if that’s the kind of project you want). I wasn’t saying you should build this thing yourself because the busy bar is bad, I was just giving some more data to the original commenter who said you can build something similar yourself for much cheaper.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
My guess was $150. Producing things costs a surprisingly large amount of money because moqs.
Go build your own for cheaper and see if you can make a living.
This seems like something I have been looking to add to my home office.
I would love to have a companion device that I can stick to the outside of a closed office door
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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.
(This isn't necessarily directed at you; just at the last minute thought to look for any top-level posts talking about this aspect. Much thanks for the piggyback! :pray:)
I've nothing but utmost love for Flipper Devices Inc., seeing their approach to PR and as a 1000% happy owner of a Flipper Zero that sits unused 99.99% of the time in my backpack (and boy, am I _extremely_ happy and relieved for the 0.01% when I need it). I would pull the trigger on this in a heartbeat if I had the play-cash.
For those specifically with productivity challenges, it seems to be a good opportunity to remind that there are simple techniques people can try out (even if I find hard to discipline myself to adhere to) like a programmer's anecdote of one of John Carmack's methods[0].
I have personally adapted that technique to buying a $20 (hour-long) sand timer and turning it to its side when I need to pause. Unfortunately, my challenge now is overcoming my reluctance to use it more often, dreading the commitment I am signing myself up for as soon as I start the timer and fear of failure. Alas, it appears that I allow that fear to control me (into shirking responsibility).
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30801421 (unfortunately, original source no longer has this entry published, and archive.org is still offline, so all I have is this HN post to cite :)
[edit]: https://archive.ph/kcKYY
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.
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)
Get a free timer and find out!
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Really nice design!
Would love to have one but.. can’t find a use-case for it
You would probably get interrupted more by people wondering what that thing is.
Anyone know how are the folks behind this and VC? This is a way too polish product and 'production' for a startup...
I just work from home and leave my Teams status set to "offline" at all times.
I still receive messages, but only reply when contacting me through Teams is the agreed-upon approach. In other words, I simply don't reply to messages that should really be emails or tickets.
Very cool idea but very pricey for what it is. I build a LED 3-4 times bigger with power supply and Rasb Pi for less (and its programmable). However, this is more convenient as a single unit. I could see myself maybe buying this for $30, probably not more.
This is giving me Dropbox vibes [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
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.
Waiting room for someone playing doom on it.
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.
Lots of features mentioned there, I wonder how many of those will be ready on launch day and what will be delivered later.
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 :/
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Add a cable with red/green status light for home office door
Great idea for us remote workers that are returning to the office, thanks.
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.
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Out of interest is there anything similar to the Ulanzi TC001 but with a slightly higher resolution.
I love the design, really want to try this one.
Looks like lametric alternative?
Yeah exactly what I wanted to say, they also got a Pomodoro Timer app: https://apps.lametric.com/apps/pomodoro_timer/8803
Since 2014 I dream about a product very very similar to this! Happy to see it built!!
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 prefer the physical cubes (or other shapes) that you rotate
Sucks to be people whose monitor faces the wall.
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Finally I can put my colleague on Verbal Probation.
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.
Don't make me tap the sign.
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...
Cool but not $189 cool.
1. Looks very easy to hack. 2. Looks very easy to clone by competitors.
It's ugly and expensive.
Another one: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/minee/minee-habit-track...
take my money
How can people just spam links of their projects and not get flamed and/or get their posts deleted?
Clicking on this page tries to XSS to a domain hosted in Russia (looks like an object storage backend) which is blocked by NoScript.
Finally, the productivity technique named after a $1 clockwork timer gets the fiddly software-and-cloud-based solution it deserves.
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.
Although i'm 50/50 on showing the price on the button, i absolutely see your point! I think for devices that are "known" - like, say, a pair of headphones - i suppose i might want to know the price right away...however, for other "unknown" devices, i'd actually like to learn more about the product, its features, maybe use-cases, etc...and as one other person rightly noted even the "Why" i might want/need the product...then again, all of this info could still be shown, and displaying the price shouldn't harm that...so yeah, i gues you're right: they should show the price on the button. :-)
Echoing this, loved the product feature callout diagram. Immediately 'view source' to figure out how it was done.
Yeah, that feature callout diagram is really cool!
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!!
Its funny you mention the aesthetics, because that's actually what i really liked from the get-go...and then started noticing all this niceties that i listed above (and more i'm sure). Like you, i'm loving the aesthetics!
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
I kind of want to see a parody video in an office where whenever someone walks up to the guy's desk with this thing, he flips it to "Busy" right as they walk up.
Comedy ensues from the awkward reactions and fake apologies.
"Ah, sorry. I'm 'Busy' now." (Smirk)
> (Raises eyebrows) Uhh, okay sure Jim.
Oh wow, another product from a Russian company. Curious where their employees pay their taxes
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
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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.
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.
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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!
Fair point given how poorly I worded it. Maybe I could try again.
Yes it's awesome to collaborate with people but if you find a workplace that ignores human factors of knowledge workers, and deters and deep focus, that is a negative signal about that employer. Egs:
This kind of environment does not promote work and also increases stress due to context switching (citation needed) and people walking behind you all day in peripheral view (seen a study somewhere). If you find a place like this, your health and career might be better served elsewhere.[dead]
TLDR: IRL Slack statuses.
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“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.
For every news story you can find of someone driving down the highway, I can find you at least 10 stories of someone crashing and burning in a multi-car pileup.
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.
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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.