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Is the Toilet Free?

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Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#71

Post by weland »

aortega wrote: post #58
Spittie wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

Perhaps there is some (elitist) disinterest floating in the air, maybe due to empathy being wanting. I also think this is an uninteresting and quite badly-done thing, but whoever did it had fun in the process and learned a couple of things in the process, and I think this deserves a lot of appreciation.

What you're probably trying to communicate (maybe in an overly-honest way) is that there is a great disparity between the function being performed and the power of the hardware there. The main obstacle the author encountered was his lack of knowledge related to electronics and embedded systems, not the scarcity of resources or the difficulty of the problem (or both) that are typically considered hacky. This is very much equivalent to writing the well-known Currency Converter application in Scala. On a quad-core system. You don't see much of that on HN.

I know people in my field (embedded systems) who, like me, are somewhat embittered by the "Arduino" and the "RPi" culture. The rate at which I have to explain why something is inadequate for mass manufacturing, unsafe, sub-optimal or outright disastrous to people who think transistors have holes in them but are really convinced is simple because they did it in node.js, on their PIs, with a couple of wires and arduino shields hooked up, has probably tripled since the Pi became popular. But not everyone who is happy about how a small hack they did works is also an arrogant asshole, and we should probably remember that before bashing them.

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#72

Post by aortega »

zo1 wrote: post #64
aortega wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chill dude, call yourself a hacker if you wish, has no strict definition anyway. I believe "fun" and "easy" projects have no merits, them being hardware/software/whatever (unless you are in high-school)

It's nice to make one once in a while, but if you only do fun and easy projects then you are wasting your life. You should try to push yourself to make things that are not easy. Get outside your comfort zone. Doing stuff with a supercomputer like the raspberry pi is easy (BTW also, it is very cheap, and sometimes projects are good only because of that).

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#73

Post by JD557 »

Here are some more ideas for you to use the data

* What's the most common pattern for two occupied toilets (from the frequencies, it appears to be the classic occupied-free-occupied, to allow more space between users) * What's the day of the week that the toilets are most used? And less used? (it would also be nice to cross-reference that with the menus from nearby cafeterias) * Check if there's any correlation between the frequency of people going to the toilet and issues on you bug tracker. What about the average duration? * If you extend your system to a coffee machine, correlate the coffee consumption with the toilet's usage.

Actually, with this, you could use most of this data and train a decision tree with it. Then, you could warn your co-workers with "In 10 minutes it is expected that the toilets will be occupied, maybe you want to go now?".

On the other hand, maybe you just want to keep this functionality to yourself, otherwise everyone will just go to the bathroom 10 minutes earlier.

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#74

Post by T-hawk »

zhte415 wrote: post #33

I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage section at the end of each carriage. Occupied was red, and unoccupied was blank. No Raspberry Pi was involved, but through careful social engineering, everyone in the carriage know what the sign meant, There was a physical hardware based fall-back also, which was a…

Good observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#75

Post by CanSpice »

coldpie wrote: post #55
jmharvey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the current status of the bathroom server, but when I was living in Random, certain bathrooms would be taken offline on Jewish days of rest (since activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work). So it's possible that the server is offline today for Passover.

> activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work Unless the operators meant it as a joke, this is absolutely ludicrous.

Not a joke. Some appliances have what's known as "Sabbath mode", because of the Jewish restriction on doing work on the Sabbath. From Wikipedia: "When an oven is in Shabbat mode, the standard six- or twelve-hour automatic shutoff is overridden, and all lights and displays (for example, a light that might go on when the door is opened) are disabled."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#76

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

benaiah wrote: post #21
arbitrage wrote: post #2

That animated background header is making me very motion sick. Ugh.

Can we stop with the nitpicking meta bullshit on every freaking article, please? I don't care about the things you dislike about a random webpage. It wasn't submitted because of a header. In order to read the article that we're actually discussing, you have to scroll down to where you can't see it anymore. It's a 10-second-at-most mild irritation. I would understand if it was an epilepsy warning o something, but it's…

This kind of "nitpicking meta bullshit" is valuable feedback to someone, like a startup, who might be marketing a product and hoping to not turn away customers. Sure, this particular thing isn't selling a product, but how many people would be turned away if it was?

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#77

Post by jmharvey »

coldpie wrote: post #55
jmharvey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the current status of the bathroom server, but when I was living in Random, certain bathrooms would be taken offline on Jewish days of rest (since activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work). So it's possible that the server is offline today for Passover.

> activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work Unless the operators meant it as a joke, this is absolutely ludicrous.

No, it wasn't meant as a joke. Exactly what activities are prohibited on days of rest is a matter of some debate [1], but the general attitude of the dorm tended to be that the bathroom server really wasn't that big a deal, so if anyone had a strong objection to it, then taking it offline (or disconnecting particular bathrooms) wasn't a problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activities_prohibited_on_Shabba...

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#78

Post by stuecclesmxm »

VLM wrote: post #30

Seeing zero referenced arrays in the detailed data output warms my heart. Looks like no one likes the middle stall. At current employer, no one uses the first stall because the flush mechanism is partially broken and no one is motivated enough to figure out how to get it fixed. A maint dude could find this data useful to find problems requiring repair. I will admit that looking at the headline I initially thought thi…

The middle stall is the smallest ;)

Re: Is the Toilet Free?

#80

Post by skelsey »

Yhippa wrote: post #40
nkozyra wrote: post #38

Prone 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.

A queue would only work if everyone used this system. Unfortunately, you will always have visitors or people who don't want to participate.
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