Anyone who has been around Reddit enough to anger the hive mind is familiar with the orangered, the envelope icon right next to your username that lights up in a beautiful orangered hue whenever you receive a new message. [Brad] wanted an orangered that was a little more visible, so he created a standalone Reddit message indicator to sit on his desk and light up whenever a new message has been delivered.

The case for [Brad]’s new orangered notifier was taken from a cheap thrift store clock. After dispensing of the mechanical movement, [Brad] loaded up the beautiful wooden case with an Arduino, a trio of LEDs, a speaker, and, of course, a small envelope logo reminiscent of Reddit’s message icon.

The Arduino is connected to a laptop running this Perl script. The script scrapes the JSON returned from the Reddit API and sends a command over the serial port to the Arduino if new messages have been received (source for the Arduino and the notes.h header file). When a new message is received, the Arduino lights up the envelope icon and plays a short sound on the attached speaker.

There are a few improvements [Brad] plans to add to his orangered indicator. First up is getting an Ethernet shield and discarding the server attached to the Arduino. Next up is different lights and tones for different types of messages (PMs, comment replies, and mod mail). Of course the top of our list for [Brad]’s future improvements is actually making the LEDs orangered, but it’s still a very awesome build to allow [Brad] to waste even more time on the Internet’s time sink.

Video after the break.

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