Compulabfit-statUSB USB LED Light

Ordered one of these since I always thought it is a good idea to use an RGB LED as a status signaling device for small headless units. This will be connected to my fitlet2 running headless.Just received it today and so far I have only had time to plug it into my Mac and surprise, surprise it came up as serial port. Based on the USB Vendor ID the MCU is a TI MSP430 system. I have not been gutsy enough to see if I can get to small plastic housing off the PCB to look at the chip.The MCU provides a simplistic serial command line interface. Type "H" to get help. The implementation seems to automatically detect the serial speed - I could connect at 9600 and 115200.Here is what the help looks like:*******************************************************P - Enter Device firmware update mode? - Return device UUID ##RRGGBB - Set LED color according to Hex color codeF - Set Fade transition Time in ms 'F1000'G - Return current color, (rr,gg,bb)B - Set Fade transition Colors B#RRGGBB-tttt#RRGGBB.... Fade transition after each colorFirmware Revision: V0.9.5*******************************************************I removed some extra line feeds to condense it. The MCU supports automatic fading from one color to another color in a user-specified transition time.This product is very similar to a blink(1) or blinkstick at a much better price point.On the downside, software support does not yet seem to exist. The fit-iot website does not really provide any extra details.Overall, I really like this product. It provides a decent price point and is very low profile. Waiting for some software support. Or maybe I will try to add support for it in the Python modules supporting one of the other libraries. Will be ordering a 2nd unit for my headless Atom server.Highly recommended to developers and makers. Not for people who are looking for a plug and play product.

Pros: Emulates a serial port so most endpoint software doesnt stop it Simple to use Small, doesnt really take up space Very brightCons: Color code not quite accurate Python library has some bugsI am very happy with the Compulab fit-statUSB. I purchased it to use as part of a pet project to display my Microsoft Teams status. With python, I was able to quickly produce a couple of solutions, one relying on a long USB extender cable and another sending a signal over bluetooth to a raspberry pi. The only drawback that I found with this is that the LED colors dont quite match their hex code, causing some of the colors to not display properly. In order to account for this, one would need to use a slightly dimmer color code. Overall, I think this USB LED has great potential for quick DIY projects.

This is an excellent little device. Easier and almost as cheap as trying to build your own, ok maybe not quite as cheap but this thing is sweet. I'm using them with Raspberry Pis in a cluster and use Ansible to switch the colors based on different things like to identify which device is currently being configured by Ansible and then whether things were successful or not. Helps maintain a visual status of things for playing and testing. I could also see these being useful for various demos.

I have 10 of these on 10 linux systems, and I can't get them to reliable function.

This is an excellent system okay indicator. I use it to blink green or red with a simple command script. Nice and bright. It works great on my Raspberry PI 400 and Dell Windows 10 laptop.It turns off after 24-hours on a Dell rack server running Ubuntu 16.04. I have tried multiple USB troubleshooting tricks, but this is still unreliable on Ubuntu.

Just received and plugged into my laptop. The light is blue. The small plastic envelop says "more info at www...." but then there's not sign of instructions about changing the light color, in particular how to "connect" to it.Update 1: after googling and searching I ended up on a wiki page that explains how to use it on Windows and Linux, no MacOS isntructions unfortunately. Playing a bit with the system I noticed a new "/dev/tty.usbmodem1421" device appearing when the device is connected, so I tried to change the Linux instructions to use that:# sudo stty -f /dev/tty.usbmodem1421 9600 raw -echo -echoe -echok -echoctl -echoke^^ this works, not sure if it does what it's supposed to do though# sudo echo "B#FF0000-1000#00FF00-500" > /dev/tty.usbmodem1421^^ this doesn't work, the command remains pending and the light color doesn't changeUpdate 2: I managed to make it work using a python script found in the wiki. One important detail is that the port name changes from system to system, and depending on which port the device is attached.-2 stars for the lack of documentation and the not so perfect color rendering, e.g. the light gets almost white with #FF3333

Super simple to use and add into stuff, no driver or random hard to use API's.There is no balance on the Tri color LED's the Green LED is too bright, make yellow colors still show as green. As a result #ff55500 is actually Yellow, instead of FFFF00 with is very green.That being said it's still better than spending twice as much.