Monthly Archives: April 2013

More ways to control your BlinkStick remotely

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Now there are even more ways to control your BlinkStick remotely! Remote control is a neat little feature, that allows your BlinkStick to become internet enabled device once connected to a computer.

There are currently 4 ways to connect BlinkStick to the web service:

  • Using the BlinkStick Client application (Windows)
  • Using command line tool from Python package (Linux, Mac OS X)
  • Writing code for Python (Linux, Mac OSX)
  • Writing code for Node.js (Linux, Mac OSX)

Head over to the tutorials section to find out more.

Would you like to control your BlinkStick with any other language or OS? No problem! Just contact me and I will make it happen! 🙂

BlinkStick Client application release 1.0.0

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blinkstick-client-application-release-1.0.0

A new version of BlinkStick client application has been released. This version addresses the issues some users had with installing application on various Windows versions. It now has been tested and confirmed working on XP SP3, Vista, 7 and 8. In addition to better Windows OS support, the following improvements have been made:

  • AmbiLight mode
  • Improved device detection in Windows XP and Vista
  • Bug fixes and other minor improvements

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Python package updated to 0.3.0

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Python Blinkstick package has been updated to 0.3.0.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/BlinkStick/

This version has the following improvements:

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Postman detector with web enabled camera, BlinkStick and Raspberry Pi

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blinkstick-raspberry-pi-postman-detector

Quentin Stafford-Fraser came up with a brilliant idea on how to combine web enabled camera, BlinkStick and Raspberry Pi to give him a notification whenever postman arrives at his door. It also gives a great overview of BlinkStick package for Python.

Check out his original blog post with embedded video and links to all of the tools and software packages used to achieve this neat hack!

It’s so great for me to see hacks like this. This is the main reason why I created BlinkStick in the first place: to be a simple tool that lets you use it in ways that I could have never imagined! 🙂

Introducing BlinkStick

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Hi, my name is Arvydas and I am very exited to introduce BlinkStick – a do-it-yourself RGB LED the size of a flash drive. When I first got to know ATTiny85 microcontroller I was fascinated by the power within it: an extremely small chip could be used in so many applications. What really interested me was the ability to make it into a USB device with just a few extra components.

I like the notification LED on my mobile phone. It shows me when I have new email, IM or social network message, but I didn’t have anything like this on my PC, so I set out to build it. ATTiny85 seemed like a perfect candidate for the job, because it has the exact amount of pins for USB communication and drive an RGB LED.

2It all started out as a simple task to display an LED notification when I receive an email to my PC, but has become an attractive DIY kit that can be controlled remotely, act as an ambilight clone, be fully hackable with support for various programming languages and even run on Raspberry Pi.

raspberry-pi-main blinkstick-ambilight-main cropped-2013-04-07-22.05.25.jpg

Keep checking this space for updates to the website, a bit of history of how it all came together, tips and news about the project or subscribe to RSS to receive notifications about new posts.