Shark With Frickin’ LED Tells People Not To Bother You

Everybody is busy these days, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. What with teleconferences being conducted over tiny Bluetooth headphones and Skype meetings where we seem to be dozing in front of the monitor, we’ve lost some of the visual cues that used to advertise our availability. So why not help your colleagues to know when to give you space with this shark themed WiFi-enabled meeting light?

Why a shark and not a mutated intemperate sea bass? Only [falldeaf] can answer that. But the particulars of the build are well-documented and pretty straightforward. A Photon runs the show, looking for an Outlook VFB file to parse. An RGB LED is used to change the color of the translucent 3D printed shark based on whether you’re in a meeting, about to step into one, or free. The case is 3D printed as well, although [falldeaf] farmed the prints out to a commercial printing outfit because of the size and intricacy of the parts. He did fabricate a nice looking wood base for the light, though.

There are plenty of ways to tell people to buzz off, but this is a pretty slick solution. For those in open floor plan workspaces, something like this IoT traffic light for you and your cube-mates might be in order.

Recovering From A Seagate HDD Firmware Bug

Hard drive firmware is about the last place you want to find a bug. But that turned out to be the problem with [BBfoto’s] Seagate HDD which he was using in a RAID array. It stopped working completely, and he later found out the firmware has a bug that makes the drive think it’s permanently in a busy state. There’s a firmware upgrade available, but you have to apply it before the problem shows its face, otherwise you’re out of luck. Some searching led him to a hardware fix for the problem.

[Brad Garcia] put together the tutorial which illustrates the steps needed to unbrick the 7200.11 hard drive with the busy state bug. The image in the lower right shows the drive with a piece of paper between the PCB and the connectors which control the head. This is necessary to boot the drive without it hanging due to the bug. From there he issues serial commands to put it into Access Level 2, then removes the cardboard for the rest of the fix.

In the tutorial [Brad] uses a serial-TTL converter. [BBfoto] grabbed an Arduino instead, using it as a USB-ttl bridge.