Hacking the BusyLight: an Update
A few weeks ago wow, over a month ago, I wrote about hacking the BusyLight to use for your own projects.
Whilst it was possible, there were some things such as sound, which I couldn’t get working, and I bemoaned the lack of an SDK.
Almost immediately after I posted it, Morten Ostergaard, a Partner at Plenom a/s (the people behind BusyLight) contacted me. We discussed potential applications for the BusyLight, and Morten gave me two really useful pieces of information, which I’m happy to share with you now:
Status Colour Customisation
You can customise the colours of each presence state (e.g. to change the colour for Do Not Disturb or to make the light brighter/less bright): Search for %Appdata% and locate the Busylight folder with an XML file where you can change the values of each LED.
SDK – coming soon!
I’m really excited about this. An SDK will be available before the end of the year! As soon as I get my hands on it you can expect another post here on it.
I’ve been sitting on this information for a while now, so apologies to Morten. If I could plug a BusyLight into myself right now, I think it would light up red: Busy!
System Status BusyLight
Our latest use for the BusyLight is as a system status monitor for something we’ve just finished and want to keep an eye on. We have system notifications, which are blue, and system errors which are red. The BusyLight works really well in this respect: a single glance confirms that everything is OK (or not!).
A major geek bonus last night: I was driving to the dive centre to do some diving and my drive took me past the office. Even though all the lights were off, because of where we’d placed the BusyLight, I could still see the light through the window! So now, as I drive past, I can glance at the light and check everything is still OK!! 😀
Written by Tom Morgan
Tom is a Microsoft Teams Platform developer and Microsoft MVP who has been blogging for over a decade. Find out more.
We use one for a Deaf Colleague. He loves it 🙂 Also stops us disturbing him lol
Any word on that SDK? It’s while some time, but I don’t see any mention of it in the most recently technical docs.
Hi Mike,
I’m aware that there are definate plans to release one. I’m not sure of the exact release date though, but as soon as I know I’ll be blogging about it!
-tom