Ambient Orb

Anyone remember the Ambient Orb by Mathmos? When they came out years ago, I very much wanted one for my desk at work to keep track of emails, ticket queues, etc.  The price was pretty high for what was ultimately a toy, so I never bought one.  If I remember right, they weren’t open source and were difficult to work with as well.

A similar, pre-IoT device came out to help you track things, the Nabaztag “Rabbit.”  It also did cute tricks and spoke to you, much like the Furby toy.  Funny how both of these devices ended up in my office via coworkers.  Ironically both are now pretty defunct, though I think are a lot of FOSS efforts to keep the Rabbits working via reverse engineering and DNS masquerading.

Nabaztag Rabbit

Well, I decided I wanted to do something fun.  Back when the Raspberry Pi craze hit, I never really bought one.  They were constantly out of stock and I had better things to spend money on.  When a coworker became infatuated with Chromebits for his kiosk needs, he chucked his Raspberry Pis in the garbage.  I rescued one and it ended up falling into one of my electronics junk boxes.  (I really do need to go through and clean those out someday.)

My original visions for the Pi were to setup a VPN for remote tech support for parents, family, and friends.  Today however, I’m settling for an alarm clock.  Voice assistant based alarms, like Alexa and Google Assistant, are too easy to yell, “shut up,” at across the room.  I’ve developed an almost subconscious “rollover and disable” maneuver for my phone’s alarm.  So what’s left? Clocky is tempting, but I’m always worried about knocking things over or injuring pets.  Enter the Raspberry Pi.

Raspbian plus a simple shell script with an ffplay fade puts me in business.  I can have the “alarm” loop forever with a heavy metal song that fades in slowly.  Why a fade? In the oft chance I actually get up before it reaches peak intensity and to also not completely jar me awake when the song starts at full blast.  To disable the alarm, I’ll have to SSH in and “kill” the script.  Pretty hard to do that from bed, much less half awake.  A simple Monday through Friday rotation is in cron and I’m looking forward to a successful test tomorrow 🙂

Oh, and for added fun: I added a blink(1) to the setup to monitor important emails, server status, etc.  It’s kind of like having my own Ambient Orb or Nabaztag Rabbit again.  Albeit this time, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.  The blink(1) is only about $30 USD on Amazon.