SparkFun Replicates Gilfoyle’s Bitcoin Price Alert System from Silicon Valley

Of the characters on HBO’s Silicon Valley, Gilfoyle is probably the most polarizing. On the one hand, he’s got some serious tech chops and is pretty hilarious. But, on the other hand, he’s not exactly nice to the other characters on the show. One fun example of that is shown in Season 5, Episode 3 when Gilfoyle creates an alert for when Bitcoin dips below the threshold where it would no longer be profitable to mine.

Of course, he didn’t just give it a simple chime. Instead, the notification is the very short — but very loud — song “You Suffer” by Napalm Death, which Gilfoyle chose specifically to startle the other characters. For SparkFun’s Enginursday, Pearce decided to replicate Gilfoyle’s alert, and you can follow along if you want to make one yourself!

Building the alert device only requires a few components: an ESP8266 Thing Development Board, an MP3 Trigger, a Hamburger Mini Speaker, and a handful of supplementary parts. The ESP8266 connects to the internet and monitors the price of Bitcoin, and when it crosses below a set threshold it plays a sound on the MP3 Trigger. That can be whatever MP3 file you want — but you can certainly use “You Suffer” like Gilfoyle did if you want to annoy the people around you!