ON & OFF – Personal status indicator

This article is on the process of writing…

This lighting installation was started from quite simple reason. The desks of developers, designers and producers in the company are located in the different areas and producers comes to developers or designers desk to talk to them. Especially partition wall exists around developers’ desk. That’s why producer can’t know whether developers are there or not until coming to there. They need to go back if a developer is there. By repeating these steps, producers waste lots time and it can make them annoy sometimes.

I got an idea of putting light bulb on top of my desk in order to show my status to other people from distance . If the light turned on, it means I am sitting at my desk and otherwise I am not there. Which means I went to man’s room or left the office. In this way the producer can recognize my status and it does’t happen to go back after checking directly. But I didn’t want to control turning on or off manually. It would be painful and it’s easy to forget to change the status. So I decided to use a physic sensor to check my status. I chose Ultrasonic Range Finder among lots of different sensors in order to check distance between a point from my desk and my body. If I sit at my desk then the distance will be less then a particular distance and otherwise the distance will be maximum because of empty space.

Step I : A simple test with a sensor and a LED

I had a simple test before installing at my desk. The sonic range finder is connected to Arduino and control a LED to turn on or off by checking distance.

Step II : Test at my desk

After getting good result from 1st test, I installed it at my desk to check any issue. I know this looks messy but it’s enough to test simply before using real light I planned. Because I had to find a perfect point to put the sensor so that measure distance. As you can see the video below, I put the sensor to the side wall. It work well but was’t perfect because sometime I lie back against my chair the sensor considers as I don’t sit at my desk.

Will be continued…