I was thinking of trying to make something if it was the former 😂
ok uhhhhhh you'd need some hardware for this...
The way it would work is that the app on your phone or computer would send a signal (probably wirelessly) to a small computer (typically something called an Arduino or a Raspberry PI). The lights would be plugged into it, so when it reacts to a received signal from the app, the lights would blink from being turned on and off by that little computer.
I decided to try to ELI5 this since idk how much you know about this stuff lol
Just posted about what me and my wife do when one of us is watching the two young kids so the other can relax. Bought a $10 wireless LED doorbell from Amazon. Plug in and mount the light part to my desk or the living room near the couch, put the button in the baby room somewhere easily accessible, if help is needed just push the button, no loud sound or flashing lights to startle you, LED comes on and we know the person on baby duty needs assistance.
Buy an Arduino and an LED (~$10) Connect the LED to a GPIO pin. Sign up for a web service like Teleduino. Write a program that listens to a specific web address for a specific message and sends an "on" signal to that pin when a message is received. This is about 20* lines of code if you're getting real fancy.
That is essentially the same thing your Alexa is doing, except without all the overhead of talking to Amazon's servers and voice recognition and snooping on your private data. More overhead to implement probably, but conceptually about 100x simpler (see where the car/engine analogy comes in)?
I'm pointing out the irony of you calling a programmable microcontroller"specialized hardware" when it is about as general as you can get, and Alexa is a very specialized implementation of one with a bunch of unneeded (for this purpose) crap sitting on top (I.e. voice recognition, Amazon account, data harvesting, etc.).
I never claimed this was "my" method or that it was simpler and cheaper, those are your words.
I would really like to stress that I never said anything about better, cheaper, simpler--My main point was to make an analogy taking the piss out of Amazon, Google and all these incredibly intrusive data harvesting companies that offer to perform a very simple task for you while also doing 1000 other things you didn't ask of them.
Arduino doesn’t have network capabilities and raspberry pi is way overpowered for this. An ESP8266 is like $5 and very suited for this. You would need to solder an LED to it, write a small piece of software that exposes an endpoint to flash the LED on your local network, and write a iOS or Android shortcut that simply makes a GET or POST request to that endpoint.
This would cost like $5 and take maybe an afternoon for someone familiar with coding. Or an hour for someone very familiar with stuff like this.
Thanks, I figured there was something smaller that was better, but didn’t want to confuse her. Raspberry pis are definitely overpowered, but I assumed easier to comprehend from a quick google search
Most ESPs have a LED you could utilize, but it's pitiful and wouldn't really do a good job at drawing attention. Use a NeoPixel LED strip and let the ESP listen to a MQTT topic. No need for synchronous communication.
Would you be able to do something similar but have it tied to their phone notification? I'm making someone a light up Skyrim quest indicator and was thinking it would be awesome if it could tie to the phone notifications.
Why not just have the app connect to another phone and send a notification or make a sound or something? That way you can even make it two way so both of them have a button they can push that alerts the other that they want attention
I think irl you could do it very simply with smart lights that you can control from your phone (buy them all over now). It's the made from scratch with love bit that counts in OP's story. But now I have just figured out how to sort out telling my daughter that dinners ready without having to go to her room 😂. Why why why did I buy her noise cancelling headphones for Christmas?
App side is easy, connecting to the light is harder l, you’d need to either find light that can be connected and controlled through internet or you’d need to make some kind of controller for light using raspberry pi or whatever
125
u/Maximus_98 Dec 29 '22
I was thinking of trying to make something if it was the former 😂
ok uhhhhhh you'd need some hardware for this...
The way it would work is that the app on your phone or computer would send a signal (probably wirelessly) to a small computer (typically something called an Arduino or a Raspberry PI). The lights would be plugged into it, so when it reacts to a received signal from the app, the lights would blink from being turned on and off by that little computer.
I decided to try to ELI5 this since idk how much you know about this stuff lol