At the office I do love a good desk prank. That is, messing with someones desk when they’ve gone away for at least a couple of days.
Each one often outdoes the last, which has left me with an increasingly difficult task.
For my latest one I thought what could be better than a desk that looks normal in the morning but then suddenly the prank happens when you least expect it.
Enter the confetti cannon:
I relented and we got a cat. He’s a good little guy, but he does create some ungodly smells. Unfortunately the best place for his litterbox is in an alcove in our lounge. Even with a window open (not possible in all weather) some smells do waft over.
This presented an excellent opportunity to over-engineer a solution using some electronics, 3D printing, and indoor hydroponics apparatus!
This is the result:
I went to a tech event and won a Raspberry Pi 3 (thanks Cisco!). That got me thinking of possible uses for this bit of kit. Something I wanted to put together for a while was a sound board for the office. Each button would play a clip pertinent to a particular person.
What I came up with took the sound board even further by adding Bluetooth based proximity detection, meaning each persons clip could play when they entered the office.
At work we use Cisco Jabber for Instant Messaging and Presence. This works great if someone wants to start a chat with you or send an email. But what happens if someone walks over and wants to talk IRL?
I thought it would be a cool little project to bring the Jabber status light into the real world.
This is what I came up with:
One of my colleagues comes out with some cracking quotes occasionally. Worried about letting these words of wisdom go unappreciated we started keeping a notebook of his best ones.
When it came time for our Christmas party it seemed fitting to present these in some way. I came up with the idea of creating a “Quoter of the year” award, and even better having the award scroll through the quotes we had collated.
What I ended up with was a Raspberry Pi Zero powered trophy with an e-ink display. It is WiFi enabled, so new quotes can be added easily.
My partner is a big fan of birds. Not a serious ornithologist by any means, but she does like to ogle some tits when she gets chance.
I thought it would be a cool project to turn our run-of-the-mill bird table into something a bit smarter. My plan was to add a motion activated camera and get the system to email us snaps whenever a bird came to visit.
It ended up becoming more complex than I initially envisaged, and involved tinkering over many weekends, I’m quite happy with the result:
It is always a frustration when you turn up to a meeting room you’ve diligently booked weeks in advance only to find it very much in use. Should you walk away? Barge in? Or design a Raspberry Pi based meeting room display?
I went with the latter.
Now, such devices already exist from a number of companies. The idea isn’t new. However, they often run into the thousands of pounds, require licencing, whole servers etc. My plan was to create something for a fraction of that cost, which could do pretty much the same job.
