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We use Slack as our messenger at work… Its an awesome program, If you haven’t seen it you should give it a glance. My main gripe with slack however is that with multiple desktops, VM’s & assorted windows i miss a few ‘new message’ alerts…
Not any more!!
1x ATTINY85 Mini Usb Development Board / DigiSpark clone ($2.50)
1x Neopixel strip (left over from another project)
1x Piece of scrap purple hart (2" x 7" x .75")
1x Piece of scrap clear acrylic (.25" thick)
1x Quckly slapped together Python script…
When somebody is typing a message to me in SLACK the lights subtly flash… If i have an un-read message the lights flash more annoyingly.
Its hard to get a good picture of it in my dimly lit office…
But i’m happy with it!
(Yes… i know i haven’t sanded down the tabs off the side of the acrylic… but i slapped this thing together in a few hours… i’ll get around to ‘finishing’ it sometime)
Yes… Slack gives you full access to the real-time api.
This is what i used…
I created a threaded wrapper around that python library that catches the notifications (somebody typing a message, new message arrived, message read) then change the lights on the NeoPixel strip accordingly.
For the lights i’m using a simple little hack… the ATTINY85 board is running a simple ‘Arduino’-ish script that makes the little board show up as a fake USB device. My Python script sends simple commands to the ATTINY85 using LibUSB.
There are simpler ways to have the computer control the NeoPixel lights… but i’m cheap and $2.50 for the Digispark is hard to beat (Adafruit sells a NeoPixel USB controller for $25US)…
I can turn this into a project with all my code (python & arduino) and better documentation if other people want to try it…
Go into the settings in the SLACK app on your phone and make sure you have ‘Push Notifications’ turned on… I get ‘push’ notifications all the time (unless i turn that setting of on the weekend when i don’t want to be bugged with work).
As @ymilord said ‘Pushover’ and ‘Pushbullet’ would probably also work for what your trying to do.
This seems awesome, I use Slack all the time and would love to do something similar but haven’t a clue how to implement. If you wouldn’t mind turning this into a project (especially the code), it would be much appreciated!
Very cool! We use HipChat at work, although I did look into Slack when I was trying to find a nice messaging service for us. I don’t know if this would be consider entirely off topic, but can anyone give me an insight on the advantages of Slack compared to HipChat?
I used the python library ‘slackclient’ to handle the slack events, then just sent simple messages to the ATTINY85 that was using a lightweight pixel library.
If you still want the actual code let me know and I’ll dig it up (its been two years )
Hey BrianM, ye the code would be great but seeing as it’s been 3 yrs so far I don’t blame you if its gone astray!
I have the code setup for turning on an led on the Attiny85 via libusb on the host comp. Just need to work out how to do use the slack api to finish it off. More than happy to share the code thus far!
Hey, I know it has been a while, but is there any chance you still have the code? I love the look of this project, and while I could figure it out myself, I have heard that a good programmer is a lazy one, so I thought I would ask.
(Adafruit sells a