Schlagwort: office

  • Create your own home office work status light with Raspberry Pi

    Create your own home office work status light with Raspberry Pi

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    If you’re working from home and you have children, you’re probably finding it all pretty demanding at the moment. Spreadsheets and multiple tabs and concentrating aren’t nearly so manageable without the dedicated workspace you have at the office and with, instead, small people vying relentlessly for your attention.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4f9AYRCZY]

    And that’s not to mention the horror that is arranging video conference calls and home life around one another. There’s always the danger that a housemate (young offspring or otherwise) might embarrassingly crash your formal party like what happened to Professor Robert Kelly live on BBC News. (See above. Still funny!)

    Well, Belgian maker Elio Struyf has created a homemade solution to mitigate against such unsolicited workspace interferences: he built a status light that integrates with Microsoft Teams so that his kids know when he’s on a call and they should stay away from his home office.

    DIY busy light created with Raspberry Pi and Pimoroni Unicorn pHAT

    The light listens to to Elio’s Microsoft Teams status and accordingly displays the colour red if he’s busy chatting online, yellow if his status is set to ‘Away’, or green if he’s free for his kids to wander in and say “Hi”.

    Here’s what you need to build your own:

    The Pimoroni Unicorn pHAT has an 8×4 grid of RGB LEDs that Elio set to show a single colour (though you can tell them to display different colours). His Raspberry Pi runs DietPi, which is a lightweight Debian distro. On top of this, running Homebridge makes it compatible with Apple’s HomeKit libraries, which is how Elio was able to connect the build with Microsoft Teams on his MacBook.

    Elio’s original blog comprehensively walks you through the setup process, so you too can try to manage your home working plus domestic duties. All you need is to get your five-year-old to buy into your new traffic-light system, and with that we wish you all the luck in the world.

    And give Elio a follow on Twitter. Fella has mad taste in T-shirts.

    Website: LINK

  • Tired of queuing for the office toilet? Meet Occu-Pi

    Tired of queuing for the office toilet? Meet Occu-Pi

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    This is the story of Occu-Pi, or how a magnet, a Raspberry Pi, and a barrel bolt saved an office team from queuing for the toilet.

    Occu Pi Raspberry Pi toilet signal

    The toil of toilet queuing

    When Brian W. Wolter’s employer moved premises, the staff’s main concern as the dearth of toilets at the new office, and the increased queuing time this would lead to:

    Our previous office had long been plagued by unreasonably long bathroom lines. At several high-demand periods throughout the day we’d be forced to wait three, four, five people deep while complaining bitterly to each other until our turn to use the facilities arrived. With even fewer bathrooms in our new office, concern about timely access was naturally high.

    Faced with this problem, the in-house engineers decided to find a technological solution.

    Occu-Pi

    The main thing the engineers had to figure out was just how to determine the difference between a closed door and an occupied stall. Brian explains in his write-up:

    There is one notable wrinkle: it’s not enough to know the door is closed, you need to know if the bathroom is actually in use — that is, locked from the inside. After considering and discarding a variety of ‘creative’ solutions (no thank you, motion sensors and facial recognition), we landed on a straightforward and reliable approach.

    The team ended up using a magnet attached to the door’s barrel bolt to trigger a notification. Simply shutting the door doesn’t act as a trigger — the bolt needs to lock the door to set off a magnetic switch. That switch then triggers both LED notifications and updates to a dedicated Slack channel.

    Occu-Pi Raspberry Pi toilet signal

    For the technically-minded, Occu-Pi is a pretty straightforward build. And those wanting to learn more about it can find a full write-up in Brian’s Medium post.

    We’ve seen a few different toilet notification projects over the years, for example this project from DIY Tryin’ using a similar trigger plus a website. What’s nice about Occu-Pi, however, is the simplicity of its design and the subtle use of Slack — Pi Tower’s favoured platform for office shenanigans.

    Website: LINK

  • Futuristic Office Ditches Cubicles for a Super Desk That Seats 125 Employees

    Futuristic Office Ditches Cubicles for a Super Desk That Seats 125 Employees

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    We have seen the future of offices, and they might look something like this. NYC-based digital creative agency The Barbarian Group has ditched the traditional cubicle design in favor of the „Super Desk“, a 1,100-foot-long structure that seats all 125 of their employees.

    SGm65LI

    (mehr …)

  • Cubikill 6

    Cubikill 6

    Reading Time: < 1 minute
    Cubikill 6

    Rick works for the same company for years now and has to tolerate his idiot co-worker Dave. Every day Dave makes Rick’s life a nightmare! But Rick has had enough! Today is the rise of the I.T. guy! Mouse to move around, pick up objects and use them.