Introduction
Blinkit is a notification software that notifies you in "real-time" with sound and light about activities on your Steem account.
The Blinkit software works with, already widely available hardware. There is a big chance you even already have the required hardware laying at home!
The idea of Blinkit is to monitor your Steem account for Upvotes, Comments, Followers, Transfers and more, the moment they happen Blinkit will play a sound and blink the LED on a connected USB flash drive.
Blinkit works with virtually any USB flash drive that have a status LED, independent of brand or model. Most preferable will be a USB stick with a bright LED and a small form factor.
After working on this project on and off for months, and struggling with finding people and ways on how this idea / project can become a reality and what programming langues to use, i decided to make some changes in the project, to make it possible for me to have a working program that is not to difficult programming wise, because i'm not a professional programmer, and that also keeps it simple to improve and customize on by others without the need of payed software , plugins and packages.
Ideology
The SteemPi project i work on, also have LED light notifications for Steem related actions on your account, but it requires the users to have/buy a (Raspberry) Pi board (or clone) and beside buying the board the user would also need some technical skills and interest to get it up and running.
The above started my quest for a (multi platform) approach to bring LED light notification to a bigger group of people, and a requirement is that it makes use of inexpensive and already widely available hardware. After some time the idea came to mind that i could possibly control the LED of a USB flash stick with a bit of code, what would make it possible to get control over the LED light, and with a bit of extra code make it light up on new Steem related actions.
USB sticks are everywhere on the world, and they are compatible with almost all Operating Systems.
Old USB sticks laying in drawers can be re-purposed and turned with the Blinkit software into a new and useful Steem related notification product.
Technical
Blinkit works with any USB stick/Flash Drive that has a status LED (read/write LED) in it, Blinkit activates the LED of any USB stick by writing files to it in specific file sizes.
Blink LED code example:
xcopy %flashdrive%\ledfile50MB.led %flashdrive%\temp\. /Y > nul
The size of the copied file results in the length of the LED blink action.
- Different file sizes can in the future be selected for longer/shorter blink action for different speed USB sticks.
- Combinations of different sized files could be used to get more control over different LED patterns.
(Accessing the LED of USB sticks in a direct IO way is not so easy, and if possible it is most likely not a general solution for all brands and models.)
The core functionality of Blinkit, is inside simple, easy to edit Batch files, this helps to keep the software easy to customize and improve. The Blinkit Interface starts the .bat files related to the actions the user want to be notified by. The batch files can be edited and run individually by the user, even after the Blinkit software is build and distributed.
The interface is made with Visual Studio and Visual Basic, and the project files and software are open sourced on the Blinkit Github page and brought under attention with the use of Utopian.
Flexibility and compatibility is very important and therefore the program should and does not require any additional packages or dependencies to work on a system.
Blinkit v1.0 features:
Save and load Steem user
Save and load USB drive letter
Load and display available drives
Steem LED notification light for Upvotes and Followers
Steem notification sound for Upvotes and Followers
Display latest STEEM, SBD price from Coinmarketcap
Recycling/up-cycling of hardware for a crypto purpose
Compatible with inexpensive/free/old/ widely available USB sticks
USB accessoires can be used, for example a USB extension cable to place the stick anywhere you want.
Optionally users can make DIY hardware modifications to the USB sticks:
- Electronic: Change the colour, brightness, add leds etc.
- Case modifications (make a LED ‘pinhole’ for the light to be more visible
- 3d design /and printing of cases and shapes that can house your USB Stick hardware
Open source software
It’s possible to contribute to the Blinkit project with Utopian, and get rewarded for improving it.
The first version of Blinkit is for Windows and will be further improved. a Linux and possibly a mac version of Blinkit could follow later.
The Blinkit software can run on (low-end) computers, laptops, servers etc.
USB sticks are easy to carry with you or, because some sticks are very small they even can be permanently connected to the computer without the need to remove it, "Plug and Stay".
Lexar S45 USB Stick available in 16, 32, 64, and 128GB
Use Blinkit with your USB stick and stay notified about Steem related actions and receive sound and light notification while doing other things.
Hardware
The most ideal models will be listed in a hardware compatibility table that will be maintained on Github, (People can help to test Blinkit with there USB-sticks and contribute there models to the compatibility table, so far i have bought and tested the Toshiba U202 and Lexar S45 and have found several other promising brands and models and i’m planning to find and test more of them.
With this post i will be testing the Blinkit followers and upvote scripts, a upvote on this post, or a follow should light up the LED of my (Lexar s45, 64GB) USB stick.
Download Blinkit v1.0
The first version of Blinkit is in test/development but can already be downloaded and used, you can get it from the Blinkit Github
Installation is simple, just follow the installation instructions on Github.
- At this moment the Blinkit software and folders needs to be located inside c:\blinkit
- The Upvotes webapi server is not always reliable, the Followers webapi work without a problem
The Steem data comes from Webapi servers and are made and maintained by @oroger and @moisesmcardona , please support them for making and publishing there webapi's.
The Blinkit project files can be downloaded and opened in Visual Studio.
Planned improvements for Blinkit:
- Make paths relative. (no need to put the program in a specific folder)
- Optimize and clean up the coding work. working on code quality, i'm not a programmer by profession.
- More comments in the code to describe the functionality.
- Setting for length of the Blink action in the interface.
- Add different Steem related Blink actions.
- Try product/Electronic DIY modifications.
- Test and Implement different (web) APIs.
- Create a usb stick hardware compatibility list.
- Create a Linux version
Steem to the Moon! let's bring some cool gadgets!
Thanks for reading, please let me know your suggestions and questions in the comments.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors