Your mouse is a notification led!

Alessandro Balzano — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 17:41:03 GMT

I know, now you're wondering what the title means. "It makes no sense at all!", you're saying. Well, it makes sense... if you have a gaming mouse.

I'm an happy owner of a Steelseries Rival 300 Fade: it's a good mouse, the hand's grip is ok and feels good to use it. Another thing I like about this mouse is that it's supported by Steelseries Gamesense.

What is the Steelseries Gamesense? Gamesense is a component that lets third-party applications control the leds on Steelseries devices. In the linked blog post, you can see how health and ammo changes are reflected on the keyboard. My friends and I were hyped when that blog post came out, but I hadn't a chance to try it until now.

Some days ago, I had an idea: what if we can remotely check how much free space we have on our NAS/Raspberry Pi... just looking at the mouse? Light of the Free Disk Space does exactly that.

When there is a lot of space on your RPi, the mouse will show a relaxing blue light.

When the free disk space starts to shrink (less than 50%), the led will have a frightening red light.

Every info about the setup and the architecture can be found in the previously linked Github repository, and more details may come in the following days.

Yes, I did it for the laughs, to start using Flask and improve my sysadmin skills with the ArchLinux install that powers my Raspberry Pi. Nothing serious, nothing good, just a fun project.

Happy new Year to you too!

Diplomats can code too! (Posts about steelseries)

Your mouse is a notification led!