Google is replacing conference room paper schedules with solar-powered LCD's, updated via 802.15 | Hacker News Reader

Google is replacing conference room paper schedules with solar-powered LCD's, updated via 802.15

code.google.com

37 pointsandreyf30 comments

Umm ... why do you need conference room schedules on the conference rooms? I've never worked anywhere that needed that.

How a "zero impact" policy of "look it up on your computer/phone"?

(Neat device though; there are other electronic sign age applications that I can imagine it being useful for).

Whenever I worked in a corporate setting and wanted some alone time to do work, and not in a bad way, people always came to my cubicle for chit-chat, it was always nice to take my laptop and find an unscheduled conference room by looking at the paper schedules printed on each one.

Yes I could've used the scheduling software, but it's far easier just to get up and go.

I just walk into an empty one ~10 minutes after the hour-- which a large percentage of the time at my company means it's free for at least 50 more minutes. If not, I leave when people come by.

Meeting rooms can change, but if you have a regularly scheduled meeting you will go there out of habit. Another thing is I've had my meetings bumped to a different room (particularly if I reserve a large room but have few attendees)

(Not all engineers carry their laptops to all meetings.)

Didn't they give everyone Android phones last year? Shouldn't that interface with Google Calendar pretty well?

Yes. My phone is associated with my personal account and not my company one though.

Besides, the system predates the phones.

Maybe I'm dense, but if you go to the wrong room you'll only know you're at the wrong room. How do you know what the correct room is?

It looks like Google's boardrooms are closer to a hotel/conference centre boardroom in terms of use to the boardroom down the hall halfway between your office and the john.

That being the case, it makes sense.

I remember taking a wireless sensor course and how they were talking about a situation at Intel headquarters trying to synchronize conference rooms. It ended up being similar to travel scheduling which is as it turns out, a hard problem.

I made a pretty sweet graphing weather monitor using this screen. Plots the indoor and outdoor temperature and of course doesn't use any batteries when it's idle. I packaged it up in a 1" thick display and have it hanging on my wall. Data is also stored onto an SD card in CSV for archiving.

You have any more details on how you put it all together?

I should take the time to put it on the web. My degree is in electrical engineering and so I went all out and designed the pcb and all the goodies from scratch. It also has an integrated capacitive touch screen that I integrated into the PCB so that I can change modes by simply pressing on part of the screen. I think it would make for a pretty sweet open source project since the display could be pretty universal and the wireless sensor could monitor lots of things beside temperature. It would make for a wicked seismograph project....

Aaron thought to himself, "If only there was a inexpensive device that could display the room reservations, we'll save all that paper ...."

seems like an interesting side project but i can't shake the feeling that, at least in this context, the solution is being over-engineered. i mean...isn't this what whiteboards are for?

The video points out that there are 2200 conference rooms, so while using white boards will save paper, but doesn't address the manpower needed to keep them up-to-date, nor the expenditure on dry-erase markers (not to mention the PR this kind of project gets you in all the right places).

Microsoft already has that and they are much better, it syncs with Exchange and so on.

Yeah, but uh.. Google doesn't use exchange ;)

I noticed that this is almost a year old - does anyone have any updates?

...it works...?

(I believe the system is not being expanded due to time/money/whatever constraints though.)

A previous poster got it right, we all have androids, and the calender program works fine, as does the email alerts. As a side note, the radishes (that's what they were called) we're tied into google calender and worked really well.

Not all of us have paired our androids with our google.com accounts, and some folks simply refused their gift phone.

I wish we had radishes in my offices. Too bad they're not available anymore.

Say what you will about how lame Microsoft Exchange is - the one advantage to it is that pretty much every Mobile Device in the world (that wants to have a market) - can bring up the Calendar in it - and give you a reminder as to what room you need to be in.

I don't see how the paper solution ever worked anyways - I can't tell you the number of times I've reserved a conference room 10-15 minutes before, hoping someone wasn't at the same time as me.

I think this is as much a commentary on Google Calendar, and how negatively MicrosoftExchange has impacted standards around calendaring, as it is on the cool 802.15 hack.

"pretty much every Mobile Device in the world"? I don't think that's true.

It's great to see 802.15 getting a little bit of press. It's fantastically low power, got pretty good range, and the throughput isn't bad. Far better than 802.11 for these kinds of devices.

For anyone who wants to play with 802.15, I strongly recommend getting your hands on some Sun SPOTs. I've been playing with one of the dev kits, and they're an amazingly hackable platform.

The age of ubiquitous computing is finally arriving, though we no longer call most of them "computers" anymore -- at least, not most people.

Like with AI, we keep defining down what is a "computer" and what's not as we cease to notice their advance.

And, heck, maybe one day the paperless office will come to pass. In 2500 or so.

We investigated cholesteric LCD screens when I was with i-conserve. Their energy use wasn't as low as e-inks, if I recall correctly, but you could buy a dev kit, as well as the actual screens, for a much more reasonable price.

Hmm, isn't Ruby an unapproved language inside Google? (i.e. not one of C/C++, Python, Java or Javascript.)

Where can I get one? Need to get my company to do the same thing.

Drop the solar panel; meeting rooms are full of hot air - there must be enough temperature differential across the door to power a Sterling Engine or a small computer...

they had paper schedules?

Admins would print out the google calendar for the room and tape it up, to be helpful. It's not like the schedule was kept on paper, just printed on it.

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