A month or so ago I got involved in a discussion on IRC about notification methods for a headless NAS. One of the options considered was some sort of USB attached LED. DealExtreme had a cheap “Webmail notifier”, which was already supported by mainline kernels as a “Riso Kagaku” device but it had been sold out for some time.

This seemed like a fun problem to solve with a tinyAVR and V-USB. I had my USB relay board so I figured I could use that to at least get some code to the point that the kernel detected it as the right device, and the relay output could be configured as one of the colours to ensure it was being driven in roughly the right manner. The lack of a full lsusb dump (at least when I started out) made things a bit harder, plus the fact that the Riso uses an output report unlike the relay code, which uses a control message. However I had the kernel source for the driver and with a little bit of experimentation had something which would cause the driver to be loaded and the appropriate files in /sys/class/leds/ to be created. The relay was then successfully activated when the red LED was supposed to be on.

hid-led 0003:1294:1320.0001: hidraw0: USB HID v1.01 Device [MAIL  MAIL ] on usb-0000:00:14.0-6.2/input0
hid-led 0003:1294:1320.0001: Riso Kagaku Webmail Notifier initialized

I subsequently ordered some Digispark clones and modified the code to reflect the pins there (my relay board used pins 1+2 for USB, the Digispark uses pins 3+4). I then soldered a tricolour LED to the board, plugged it in and had a clone of the Riso Kaguku device for about £1.50 in parts (no doubt much cheaper in bulk). Very chuffed.

In case it’s useful to someone, the code is released under GPLv3+ and is available at https://the.earth.li/gitweb/?p=riso-kagaku-clone.git;a=summary or on GitHub at https://github.com/u1f35c/riso-kagaku-clone. I’m seeing occasional issues on an older Dell machine that only does USB2 with enumeration, but it generally is fine once it gets over that.

(FWIW, Jon, who started the original discussion, ended up with a BlinkStick Nano which is a neater device with 2 LEDs but still based on an Tiny85.)