The very final piece of the reComputer 1000 to be built was the LED notifier in the lid, primarily because the idea to build it never even occurred to me until the very end of the project. It wasn't until I realized that I'd have some empty space inside the LCD lid that I thought about putting something up there. My first thought was an external WiFi adapter, but I figured if I wanted something higher -performance than the onboard wireless, I could always make it a cartridge (and indeed, I did).

With the addition of the USB hub in the lid, plus the dedicated micro-USB lead coming off of it, all I needed to do was add in a mount for an Arduino Pro Micro and a diffuser for a common addressable RGB LED bar. 

I'm quite pleased with how the elements of the notifier diffuser continue the "vent" design that runs across the top of the lid, and integrates with the speaker grills. It's the little things in life, you know?

On the software side, I was planning on writing some kind of a friendly tool to control the notifier. But in the end, you have to fire off commands using echo on the command line. Which actually works out pretty well, since it's easy to implement into Bash scripts and that sort of thing.

For a demonstration of some of the notifier's built-in animations, and how you control/customize them, check out this video I put together: