Woo, microcontrollers.

April 29, 2013 6:36 AM

Liquid Lifebar, an Arduino project. (SLYT)
posted by Evernix (6 comments total)

That's pretty sweet. I'd like a similar lifebar to put on my desk so coworkers know if it's safe to enter my cube and ask for "oh, just one little thing."
posted by scottatdrake at 6:51 AM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'd like a similar lifebar to put on my desk so coworkers know if it's safe to enter my cube and ask for "oh, just one little thing."

Get a tube, fill it with an inch of water, put a red LED in it, done.
posted by eriko at 7:08 AM on April 29, 2013 [3 favorites]

My first thought was that the combination of color and level could make a really cool, though somewhat gimmicky, visual indicator of something for a team. On further thought, it would probably be much less impressive in a brightly lit office.

It could display continuous build status (the Github office has a stoplight for this), or server availability and load.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 7:14 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Cool project and a copyleft music win. But if I'm reading this right, it's a closed-source game. How did he connect the health status to the light bar? Maybe the game is scriptable.
posted by DU at 7:44 AM on April 29, 2013

But if I'm reading this right, it's a closed-source game. How did he connect the health status to the light bar?

"The test UI you see is a C# windows form I wrote integrated with terraria using tconfig and a custom mod to launch it."

He's using a mod. I guess you could also use something like sikuli.
posted by zamboni at 9:16 AM on April 29, 2013

But if I'm reading this right, it's a closed-source game. How did he connect the health status to the light bar?

zamboni answered this, but in general, you can attach a debugger and figure out where in memory the health status is stored while the game is running.

(Fun fact: This is the strategy used by all of the third party Dwarf Fortress mods, because there is no API for Dwarf Fortress)
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 6:57 PM on April 29, 2013