

Spark Core Bathroom Monitor - nixpulvis
http://americastestkitchen.github.io/rails/embedded/2014/06/15/bathroom-status/

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joev_
Wow, this just makes me love America's Test Kitchen even harder.

Edit: and it's served from a statically-generated jekyll blog that is on their
github page. Did I mention they have a github account. Very random and
awesome.

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tricolon
In case you haven't seen it, here's the long-running Random Hall bathroom
server: [http://bathroom.mit.edu/](http://bathroom.mit.edu/)

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nixpulvis
Hadn't seen that before, very cool. What do the "*"s mean next to the
bathrooms.

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nixpulvis
Oh I'm an idiot, they are just a easier way to see occupied.

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x1798DE
Does this method fail if someone closes the door behind them when they leave
the bathroom? I'm not sure of the exact setup of the bathroom, but I can
imagine that many people would instinctively close the door behind them rather
than leave it open. Maybe at ATK they have a strong culture of open =
unoccupied.

What would be ideal is if it could be wired to the locking mechanism of the
door. That's probably decently simple to do if the door is locked using a
deadbolt because something physical is actually entering the doorframe. If
it's just a lock that prevents the doorknob from turning, then you'd likely
need to disassemble the locking mechanism and see where you can attach a
switch.

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nixpulvis
There is a strong culture for leaving the door open, to avoid the awkward door
knock. This defiantly does mean we can have false "occupied" states, but in
practice at our office this doesn't happen.

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x1798DE
Actually, if you were to implement something that monitors the state of the
door lock, the same hardware could run an OCCUPIED/VACANT LED on the door
itself to avoid the awkward door knock in the event that the door is closed
while the bathroom is unoccupied.

Of course, if someone forgets to lock the door, that's basically an invitation
for everyone else to walk in on them. On second thought, it seems to me that
the best solution here is to mount webcams in the bathroom so that anyone can
see if it's occupied. Seems like the only foolproof way to go here.

~~~
nixpulvis
On a related note, we have a take home fridge at ATK, there was some
discussion about how to tell when new food was added to the fridge. Cameras
might have been an option there.

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jeffclark
My favorite part: "The next step involves complex analysis of historical
bathroom visit data, to allow for statistical insight into bathroom habits.
Oh, and a 💩 icon for when the bathroom has been occupied for more than 5
minutes."

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platz
Brings new meaning to the "The Quantified Self"

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dcalacci
I wonder when the productivity benefit to ATK employees will outweigh the $$
they spent paying you to make this.

It actually would have been very interesting to poll employees and get data on
'failed bathroom trips' per day per employee before you finished the project.

From there, you could extrapolate the (supposed) daily productivity increase
and do things like plotting the $$ or minutes saved per day on the screen.

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nixpulvis
Well aside from the fact that most of this development was done in my free
time, I can say personally it's saved my a good amount of frustration and
time. Hard to really quantify though.

~~~
jackvalentine
Actually it's quite easy to quantify!

First you need to wire up switches in everyone's seats...

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zheshishei
Here's another bathroom monitor from thoughtbot a while back:
[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/arduino-bathroom-occupancy-
dete...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/arduino-bathroom-occupancy-detector)

