Gadget Master

This one kind of reminds me of the Trojan Room coffee pot, the world's first webcam monitoring a coffee pot in the old computing department of the University of Cambridge...

An inventive Gadget Master was frustrated at work by never knowing whether a distantly-located small room was occupied or not. So he set about creating a monitoring system that would help avoid useless trips - he dubbed it iPotti, the box for which carries the slogan ' know when its time to go'. It should be emphasised that sensors rather than webcams are used!

Using a Make interface board powered by an a Atmel Sam7 Arm microcontroller, he also employed some ambient light sensors and some Ethernet connectivity and built the system himself.

He writes:

The sensors see ambient light like the human eye does. I mounted them up above the bathrooms and oriented them to look through little vent holes in the lighting canisters. The light cans keep themselves pretty cool, so there shouldn't be any worries about melting the little sensor thingies. (Read on to see the sensors and their PCBs.) Here is what they look like mounted near the ceiling light cans:

The sensors are spliced to 4-wire alarm cables that run back to the main iPotti server. The two cables join into a single RJ-45 connector (same one used for Ethernet, looks like a big phone jack connector) and then snap into a port in the side of the iPotti device box.

The Achilles Heel of the project? People don't always turn the lights off. Doh!.... However, overall the system works well, he maintains.

Read his full post >>

Pictured is the iPotti ambient light sensor.

Thanks to Technabob for highlighting this one.