
Ask HN: Best way to spend $1k on hardware to impress visitors? - estomagordo
My manager has a budget for &quot;directed playing around&quot;, that is, purchasing tech things for us devs to play around with. It doesn&#x27;t have to result in anything in particular, but it would be nice if we could improve life around the office somehow, and also impress visitors.<p>The types of hardware we&#x27;re looking at is definitely RPi and similar, with or without peripherals. But smaller IoT:ey stuff is also interesting.<p>I&#x27;m struggling to think of the killer app, the very cool application we should gather around. Any ideas?<p>I&#x27;m stuck on Raspberry Pi, camera, and using Tensor Flow for something. Probably facial recognition. But it feels _very_ unoriginal.
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mtmail
I've seen instructions to build a noise traffic light. Basically turns red
when the noise level is over a threshold. I found that useful in an office
environment. Bonus if you can hook that up to a real life-size traffic light.

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estomagordo
That's really quite cool.

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moondev
How about your own "wall of entropy":

[https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137157/the-hardest-working-
of...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137157/the-hardest-working-office-
design-in-america-encrypts-your-data-with-lava-lamps)

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estomagordo
Very cool!

