Show HN: A Google Calendar Door Sign | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Google Calendar Door Sign

newfangled.me

142 pointsalfo33 comments

Way back before the WWW my student dorm door was plastered in misc comics and clippings - I kept cycling the clippings and being part if a high traffic corridor it got me a number if interesting people knocking to say they enjoyed it.

It was I guess my first blog (maybe Pinterest)

Anyway, besides that I think this really would be a fantastic solution to the "meeting room" problem.

Book a room direct from the door itself - seems natural to me.

I worked for a very large software corporation for a few years, and we had exactly this. Little touchscreen LCD displays to the side of the door for all the major meeting rooms, on which you could book the room.

Nobody used it for that, though. They just did it from their desk through Outlook. It was useful to see how long a room was free for if you needed it for an impromptu meeting, however ("Next booking for this room is at 14:00 by Dave Smith (dsmith)" or whatever).

Yeah but people who book rooms in advance from their desk are called ... Err ... organised :-)

I think the lack of rooms available to scatterbrained too busy people is a major source of negative creativity in the world

There might be a market for an e-paper based version of this that shows an entire day or week of schedule.

This is kinda neat: http://hackaday.com/2013/08/28/kindle-hack-ads-value-to-the-...

thiefs are going to love it

If I were going to steal stuff from my office, I'd probably grab a couple of the 16-core workstations before disassembling the wall to get a $100 e-ink conference room schedule.

I assume he meant broadcasting current location. I don't think that's the actual application here anyway, but it's a real concern that thieves exploit via FB/Twitter announcements all the time.

For the office, though, not really a concern.

yes, as in the webpage the first image shows:

"Alex is at: climbing west center (home calendar"

I think the problem should be solved earlier, not at the end location but much earlier: I don't want to find out that a person is unavailable when I'm there.

I wish there were larger eink displays available for hacking.

32" was exhibited back in June; not so much 'available for hacking' though:

http://www.einkgroup.com/news.php?recordId=526

I've been in a few buildings where each door had a fat 15" LCD screen mounted beside it, displaying current and upcoming reservations. Even at my university they were beginning to implement them. You probably need good connections with commercial builders to compete in that space, though.

Or AV designers hired by the architects that specify these products for projects. Most commonly these are something like Crestron[1] or AMX[2] room scheduling panels.

[1] http://www.crestron.com/resources/product_and_programming_re...

[2] http://www.amx.com/products/MSD-431.asp

I built something similar for my desk using a raspberry pi and this 2.7 inch e-ink display: http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/displays/lcd_27_epap...

The nice thing is they have python drivers for it and it works with the gpio pins.

There is. In fact there's a whole suite of products out there serving it.

At the base level you have DIY solutions (small LCD's, e-ink etc) which are loads of fun to build and can work quite nicely for some scenarios.

Another option that a lot of buildings are starting to use is iOS / Android apps along with a device in a wall mount (https://eventboard.io/ et al). Cheap (ish), easily replaceable and upgradeable hardware and apps that are quite affordable.

From here you then move into more dedicated devices which also provide some deeper integration with the environment. Traditionally this has something that has been handled by the AV world with products such as AMX's (http://amx.com/) RMS or Crestron's (http://www.crestron.com/) RoomView, however there's a bunch of other really exciting players around to like Condeco (http://www.condecosoftware.com/) which merit some consideration. Regardless of who's providing it, its at this level the tech starts to getting a little more exciting. Generally you begin to tie in with sensors (PIR, seat pressure, signal presence on laptop input etc) inside the room to provide analytics on occupancy, auto cancel meetings when there's a no show, integrate with NFC for handling access control or user auth etc. If you coming from the AV side the rest of the room can also start to interact with that booking information to (for example, parsing meeting info for video / teleconference details etc).

Wow. Impressive overview

One more thing - is there much movement on automated minute taking (speech to text as it were?). In terrible meetings my mind occasionally wonders ...

Cheers. I work in that industry, so a little involved.

Whilst not 'official' meeting minutes, for a personal record I jot down mind maps (generally on a tablet), however I know a few people that love these: http://www.livescribe.com/ for keeping a record.

Also, text to speech is text to speech. It's a pretty challenging problem with a single speaker and no room acoustics to worry about (headset mic) throw in a number of speakers and other sound sources and things get interesting. Even in courtroom environments where you have discreet audio feeds from each party AFAIK most places still use humans to create transcripts.

I made something very similar using an Arduino Ethernet (using Power Over Ethernet). For the same reasons you mentioned, I totally recommend your way over mine; the Arduino was super expensive, and doing the HTTP myself was more work than it should be.

http://drewgottlieb.net/2014/03/02/opensource-event-display....

Site lists the Core with embedded chip antenna at $39, which is about the cost of a $35 Trinket 6-pack (http://www.adafruit.com/products/1509). Granted those lack connectivity, but I think there's a sweet spot for something in between (i.e., with built-in BLE), maybe along the lines of these: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2016620887/mcthings-tin...

Either way the Spark looks nice, and the extra cost is sure to be recoverable in developer time.

There's actually a new Chinese board that does that cheaply. $4.50 per unit, you could probably get cheaper price if you bought them in bulk. It's the ESP8266ex. Someone used on to implement a simple minecraft server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1zx0xV0pWw

This sounds like a very nice DIY project but if you like to check it on your phone you can try bookingbubble | meeting room booking system (http://www.bookingbubble.com/)

To power this with a battery a better solution would be to use a switching power supply. (For example a LTC3525 step up converter with two AA 1.5 V batteries.)

The linear voltage regulator basically turns 4V of the 9V block into heat. This is not really efficient.

Here's a step-down converter from Adafruit https://www.adafruit.com/products/1066 It's pin-compatible with the linear regulator, so you can just swap it out.

Sorry, spark.io is down and I'm not sure what it is: A dev-board? Why not use an RPi instead of an arduino for something like this? costs ~ 25-35 USD (depends on model) + a WiFi dongle and you can write code in Ruby/Python?!

Spark core is a low power ARM Cortex M3-based board with WiFi onboard. Very neat.

I can give you several good reasons why it is more useful to do this with a Spark core (or an Arduino), but the most important to me is that learning how to program very constrained hardware platforms is useful.

A similar product that has been around for a little longer is electricimp (http://www.electricimp.com). I've done a couple of little projects with it at home, but is has also been used in several consumer products already.

I can probably do that on a bifferboard[1]. I own one that it's out of use now, but still I'd so so much more potential on a RPi.

Anyway it's good to have choices! I'd probably grab a 'spark' since I can write code in ruby, comes very handy! :-)

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/

Actually it's not down, just needs a www (the link on the site points to https://spark.io, which doesn't resolve, but https://www.spark.io works fine)

Thanks for pointing that out, I tried following the author's link and assumed it had gotten the HN hug.

I'm working on a smart building project, anyone recommend any good resources? This calendaring system is right up my alley of types of integrations we are looking into.

Are you looking for off the shelf systems or parts/info to build one with?

There was a team at Hack The North that accomplished this similar thing but with using Facebook's Events API and NFC.

This sounds like a fun experiment to try out. Cheers!

Wanted to build one for the office but the location of the available powerpoint quickly killed the idea.

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