A slack bot, to automate your office using a Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

A slack bot, to automate your office using a Raspberry Pi

github.com

32 pointsmooreds17 comments

The title is a bit of a stretch...My office does payroll, sales, purchasing, IT support, does this help with any of that?

Is this in fact 'building automation' or a 'slack switch'

'Fan on', anyone who thinks that the hard part of maintaining office temperature is switching has never worked in a real office. Get me a slack bot that can successfully negotiate what the temperature should be and then I will be interested.

It sounds like in the title they're using the literal definition of office, rather than your broader "office and those who occupy it" definition.

God damn, telling me to go to YouTube to figure out what it can do, where the video is some desktop screen; and audio (and minutes of my time) is needed to hear what they're saying. So user unfriendly, mobile users in particular.

this is a tiny script/hack that someone did 2 years ago and was kind enough to open-source. That person probably did not post the link to HN. So, what do you expect?

I’m guessing, “text”.

Just to clarify, what this does is take commands from Slack and translate them to some predefined GPIO signals which you can of course edit.

It’s a simple script for which there are tons of tutorials around. Expected way more from the title (“to automate your office”).

But slack is not used by companies anymore after the showed how they handle user data, is it? Are there still people out there using slack?

Yes, there are people out there using slack as the alternatives aren't that better. To use Microsoft teams the entire company needs to be on office365 and teams isn't that integrated with every service yet. Google chat is supposed to be cool but it has the same issue.

Most of my clients use slack in their companies with teams from 20-25 to around 600.

We use mattermost and its pretty great so far. Not as fancy as slack but gets the job done.

My very large company uses slack and Microsoft teams. Mostly engineers use slack, managers mostly use teams.

It's probably because of how much nicer slack is to use.

Cool, but every time I see something like this I feel the need to point out gpiozero - https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

    from gpiozero import DigitalOutputDevice
    relay = DigitalOutputDevice(17)
    relay.on()

They appear to have some hand-wired device for controlling the mains. If you don't want to wire that yourself, consider something like this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2935

Less likely to electrocute you.

This is a guide for all the trivial parts of "automating your office" like receiving signals from user over the internet and turning them to electrical signals (rpi and slack make it trivial).

The non-trivial parts are left to the user, like hooking up your "office" to these electrical signals.

Edit: also this was just a school project [0] and not an actual real life use example.

[0] (https://github.com/vitorverasm/slackbot-iot/commit)/98024bd6...

There's an erroneous end paren in the url after /commit

I made this code 2 years ago for a class named "Introduction to electronics" so I was learning python and circuits at the time. And yes, the title and proposal are quite overrated. Surprisely we used a variation of this script to automate a lab in my university. When I pushed this to Github it was just for my colleagues. I'm having fun, I don't know why this came up after al these years.

I’m imagining this listening for CI/CD events to announce Over the PA who just broke the build....

Nobody wants their lightbulb and fan connected to the internet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com