Dream Cheeky email notifier and Linux

As much as email and webpage alerts are useful, sometimes you just need a good old fashioned physical heads up saying something is broken. Enter the Dream Cheeky usb email notifier.

 

It's designed to hook up to a pc and light up any color you want when you get emails in. I stumbled across this and thought this is perfect for using it in Linux for monitoring. But like most things, no official linux support. After some digging though, I found some instructions on how to get it to work with Linux (https://github.com/daniel-git/usblamp).So I got mine from amazon yesterday and it works like a charm.

Some quick commands to get it up and running:

sudo apt-get install g++
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
wget https://github.com/daniel-git/usblamp/tarball/master --no-check-certificate
tar xzf master
cd daniel-git-usblamp*/src
make
sudo make install

And that's it. You control it via the command "usblamp". Works great in bash scripts. Some examples include:

usblamp green
usblamp '#8258FA'
usblamp off

The switching time keeps up with as fast as the system can change the color (did a while loop to test). I'm sure this could be physically hacked to so it's not a little envelope sitting on a server. You could probably take it a part and do other stuff with it. But for under $20, it's hard to beat.