Happy Coder

This weekend we in A Great Place to WorkPLACE have utilized a series of different sensors, microcontrollers, bits and pieces. To stitch this together we ended up with more programming languages than you can count on one hand! 🤚

First out, we made an RFID-reader on an ESP8266-based Node MCU. The software on this controller was written in Arduino. It reads the ID from any card, tag or even NFC on a mobile phone. This ID is then sent to an orchestrator software on a Raspberry Pi. 📟

The orchestrator itself is written in Python. This lives on a PI that acts as a hub for all the microcontrollers, sensors and actuators. The job of the orchestrator is to keep a state of the system and communicate with our datastore in the cloud. 🐍

To keep track of our datastore we developed a smashing dashboard in React. This gives administrators a birds-eye view of employees average desk-height, preferred temperature, etc. This can enable managers to facilitate the employees with prima working conditions. P.s. the dashboard even has a party-mode! 🎉

For an employee to register themself in the system we have our very own Android-app! You simply use the NFC on your phone to scan your employee-card and register your preferred desk-height and temperature. All done, and you are ready to log into a workspace. The app is written in Java. 📱

We were provided with a Micro:bit with an LED matrix, which works perfect as our "Do Not Disturb"-sign. Whenever the employee wants to work undistracted he pushes a button and the Micro:bit displays a big red "X", indicating that you need to back of. The Micro:bit company provides its own JavaScript Blocks Editor; You drag and drop code blocks to the right places to program the controller. Easy-peasy! A lot like Scratch, for those of you familiar with this. 🔠

In addition to thesse languages, we have series of bash-script, systemd-services, configuration-files. 🐡

This blog post is a submission for the Babelfish badge