Building a work status indicator
Often times with Return to Work (RTO) people will often ask eachother's status. Not only if they are in office that particular day, but if they are busy as many meetings happen over Teams / Zoom these days. My workplace also introduced Agile cubes, which are desks which may be "rented" for the day, and vary in location greatly. As a result, it may be hard to track down someone, especially if they have stepped away from their desk. This indicator light aims to solve that, for myself.
Overview
A visual indicator which is stuck on top of my name tag in my cube will show my status. These include Available (Green), Away (Yellow), Busy (Red), Agile Cube (Blue), or Work From Home (lights off).
The Hardware
The hardware device was an Arduino microcontroller and a number of LEDs. LEDs represent my status and the microcontroller will allow updates.
The Firmware
The Arduino device had an ESP8266 module to allow for Wi-Fi connections. I used this to setup to my home server, to both monitor the times changed in case I wanted the metric but also ensure the microcontroller acknolwedged the update
The Software
I have a node backend to accept requests to update color (with 4 status options). Here I am using Postman to test changing the server status (left side) and noting the change appears in the server (upper right) and also in the arduino (bottom right). After noting the response in arduino, I visually inspected the board to ensure the appropriate LED had changed and that Gotify (my notification system) also had the relevant update.
