beakn is a Lync Status light built with a Spark Core or Photon. You can find a step-by-step guide for the latest version here: http://blog.jongallant.com/search/label/beakn
Always install the latest beakn.exe client from here: https://github.com/jonbgallant/beakn/releases
Before I decided to go with Spark I played around with a few other options. Blog posts detailing my experience for each of them are below.
##Arduino http://blog.jongallant.com/2014/12/beakn-v0-1-diy-lync-status-light.html (USB) or http://blog.jongallant.com/2014/12/beakn-v0-2-diy-lync-status-light.html (Ethernet/MQTT) ##Netduino http://blog.jongallant.com/2014/12/beakn-v0-2-diy-lync-status-light.html (Ethernet/MQTT)
##RaspberryPi http://blog.jongallant.com/2014/12/beakn-v0-3-diy-lync-status-light.html (Ethernet/MQTT)
##SparkCore http://blog.jongallant.com/2014/12/beakn-v0-4-diy-lync-status-light.html (WiFi/SparkCore Cloud)