Meeting Light

The Meeting Light

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I (like many workers globally) was told to work from home indefinitely. While I relished the idea of cutting 2 hours off my daily commute time, my office at home was not a perfect work location. While it's a separate room from the rest of the house (providing me a quiet and comfortable workspace) it's also the working office for the whole household. All our paper files (yes, we still have paper files) as well as the network printer and office supplies are in that room. Thus, when my wife (who has full-time duties as well) needed to access any of those things she needs to come into the office. Many Zoom meeting and conference call participants in those early days got a glimpse of my wife as she came into the room to retrieve one thing or another. I needed a way to let her know if I was out of meetings, on a conference call, or on a video call so she would know when (and how) she was able to come into the room.

The Meeting light is not a new idea. In fact, I've seen variations of them all around our corporate office for quite some time. But why just buy such a gadget when I could make a perfectly serviceable one! All I needed were a few spare parts. I knew it had to be visible from 10-15 feet away so my wife (and anyone else in the house) could see it through the glass doors of the office long before getting to the door. And the table where it would sit was across the room from my desk, so I needed a wireless controller to change the display based on the meeting type I was in.

Moteino to the Rescue

I have been playing around with Moteinos for a while. A Moteino is an Arduino clone with a built-in RFM69 radio transceiver allowing you to build remote control applications across wide distances. There are several brands of RFM69 Arduino clones out there, but Joe Hopper at Fracture Labs turned me on to the Moteinos early on and I've found them to be reliable and easy to use. It was the perfect fit for a remote control sign application like Meeting Light. With one board embedded in the remote control and the other in the LED display box I was on my way.

Speaking of the display box, the astute observer will see the photos below and notice that the display box looks awfully familiar. In fact, it's the same box I used in the original Hex Clock, then repurposed for the Game of Life Simulator. Why reinvent the wheel (or the box) when I already had a great design that worked?

Photos

Schematics and Code

The schematic diagrams and Arduino source code can be found in the Meeting Light GitHub repository.