When I see projects like this, I always remember that that's how webcam was invented.
Is the Toilet Free?
61–70 of 126 posts
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#62Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.
Yeah, this has only become a problem in the last few months where we've been growing the company. We don't really have the space to build new toilets, and soon we'll outgrow our beautiful office, partially for this reason. For now I think we're happy to wait occasionally for the loo. As another poster observed, this project was a fun way to improve the waiting experience and make the most of the facilities that we have.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#63Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.
We can hope the logs help to make the problem very concrete and easy to argument.
If you can push numbers about the maximum time someone has to wait before having access to a bathroom, the qualification of the problem could shift from "inconvenient" to a potential health problem.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're enjoying yourself and having fun, it's not a waste of time.
Creating useful things is also very fun. And takes about the same time/energy. Anyway, doing stuff with a raspberry pi has no hacker merits IMHO. Anybody can connect stuff to a portable supercomputer and make it do things.
So you're basically saying that you're only a "hacker" if you do stuff with hardware. That is completely upside down, if not borderline elitist.
Building stuff and "hacking" has no requirement for hardware. It hasn't been that way for a long while. Now excuse me while I gladly take our Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and "software" thingimaggigs off your precious lawn.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#65Tie the data in with people's lunch calendars and you can start forcasting peak toilet demand!
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#66Prone to race conditions, unfortunately. What's more frustrating than seeing Yes and then finding the door closing in front of you.
Maybe they could add a reservation queue to the bathroom as new functionality. That would probably be unnecessary blocking if people abandon their place in line.
Maybe the bathroom lock could literally be a mutex.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#67Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.
One of the developers at work put an Pi-sized device on one of the toilet stalls, with a page on heroku to show the status of the stall. It worked well, and yes, we do have too few toilets at work.. :(
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thoughts exactly. Kudos for geeking out on the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.
On the other hand, building new bathrooms or expanding existing ones can be a long and expensive process, so improving the efficiency of existing resources can be a smart way to go.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to declare the bathrooms unisex, especially if you have a serious gender imbalance at work. I worked at a startup office that had a (typical) 80% male to female ratio, but the building was designed with two male and two female toilets.
These were the types of bathrooms that had a single toilet, a single seat, and a door for the whole thing, much like a bathroom in your home. Having such a bathroom be assigned to one gender only doesn't really make much sense, but it was especially apparent when there was frequently a line for the men's bathrooms while both womens were empty.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#69I would even go as far as "booking toilet". Sometimes when you need to take #2 and you absolutely want privacy (because that's a multi-tenant restroom) and isolation, you can pay for the next toilet by "paying". How to pay? Could just be a drink, or say thank you aloud to your coworker. Something fun.
Re: Is the Toilet Free?
#70Random Hall (a dorm at MIT) has/had a `bathroom server' that did exactly that and also a `laundry server' that tells you whether the laundry machines are busy. The bathroom server used to be at http://bathroom.mit.edu (seemingly offline now) and the laundry server is at http://laundry.mit.edu
The bathroom server was up until just a few weeks ago. I'll have to ask someone here what happened. (We've had the system for over ten years, I think, so some of the equipment is getting old. )
Erons and I (you'll probably not recognize me?) worked on the bathroom server about a year ago - I think the infrastructure is still in place, it might just need to be reconnected.