nbe95/home-office-light

A fancy home office LED indicator.

Home Office Light Indicator 🔦 🚨

The COVID-19 crisis changed the life of all of us. Working at home became normal and a crucial test for anyone living in an apartment with at least one roommate.

💡 The idea

This is why I got bored and made a Home Office Indicator light using LED strips attached to two engraved glass tiles! Those tiles are mounted outside my (very small) office room and indicate to the outside world whether I am in a very important call or video conference, not wanting to be disturbed. Plus, a ring button is attached to it, which produces a buzzer sound inside.

The entire device is running on a Raspberry Pi in a Docker container and also offers a web frontend. A few push buttons mounted at my desk and attached to an Arduino Yún - which I pretentiously call the Remote - control the state of the light via network. Of course, it can be turned to any state from devices within the local network, too.

🪦 Since I'm no longer living in the apartment when I had this Home Office Indicator up and running, I archived this repo and won't keep it up to date. But feel free to use it!

🚥 The Light

The indicator light implements a simple state machine running 5 modes/states in total.

Idle	Call	Video	Ring (flashing)

• ⛔ Idle: Nothing going on at all.
• 📞 Call: The bottom glass tile with "Call" engraving lights up yellow.
• 🎥 Video: The top glass tile with "Video" engraving lights up red. Also, the button between the glass tiles becomes active and triggers the "Ring" mode when pressed.
• 🔔 Ring: Both glass tiles are flashing light-blue to indicate the request to the inside. A buzzer sounds once as an acoustic signal, too. After 30s, the light automatically falls back to "Video" mode.
• 🌈🦄 Unicorn mode: The device goes completely crazy and flashes in all rainbow colors very quickly! While this mode is a must-have and, of course, only intended for fun, it may be considered as a signal that you're really annoyed of a specific customer and need a cup of coffee very quickly...

When I moved out of the apartment, I realized that I had no photos of the device at all, so I quickly made one right before disassembling it. At this time, I already cut the data cable, so I could not take a picture or video of the real action (e.g. the Unicorn mode! 😢), sorry! However, I edited the "Idle" photo above to give you a vague impression of how it looked like.

🕹️ The Remote

These 4 little membrane keys directly control the state of the Home Office Indicator. When pressed, they trigger the attached Arduino to send a state request to the Raspberry Pi controlling the Home Office Indicator instance. (Again, this is unfortunately the only photo I've got.)