
Show HN: A Google Calendar Door Sign - alfo
http://newfangled.me/door-sign/
======
lifeisstillgood
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.

~~~
Edd314159
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).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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

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

~~~
kimburgess
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/](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/](http://amx.com/)) RMS or Crestron's
([http://www.crestron.com/](http://www.crestron.com/)) RoomView, however
there's a bunch of other really exciting players around to like Condeco
([http://www.condecosoftware.com/](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).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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 ...

~~~
kimburgess
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/](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.

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dag11
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....](http://drewgottlieb.net/2014/03/02/opensource-event-display.html)

------
rcarmo
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](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...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2016620887/mcthings-tiny-
wireless-bluetooth-sensors-and-contr)

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

~~~
dwild
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1zx0xV0pWw)

------
BogdanUK
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/](http://www.bookingbubble.com/))

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dlsym
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.

~~~
sp332
Here's a step-down converter from Adafruit
[https://www.adafruit.com/products/1066](https://www.adafruit.com/products/1066)
It's pin-compatible with the linear regulator, so you can just swap it out.

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atmosx
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?!

~~~
bborud
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.

~~~
atmosx
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/](https://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/)

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brianbreslin
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.

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

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jonalmeida
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!

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jammy47
Wanted to build one for the office but the location of the available
powerpoint quickly killed the idea.

