Back in November I posted about my desire for some way to reliably monitor and report available study seats within the library. I recently heard about Pinoccio, an Indiegogo project, and suspect it might do the trick! It's a very small Arduino board with an optional WiFi board. If one plugged a motion sensor, or used the included temperature sensor, it'd probably be able to report whether there was a body sitting at a given location. Small enough to work, WiFi and a long-life(?) battery. Ooh, even better, you don't need the WiFi bridge for each unit, only one for a given area, so that brings down the cost and complexity.
Pricing in bulk seems reasonable – they have a $999 package that would get you 20 monitors and a WiFi shield. Unfortunately we still have a couple hundred seats I'd like to be able to monitor, so realistically we probably still have to get the cost down. That's the primary reason I haven't given more thought to a more finished product like Twine… I think I'll drop the founders a note asking if they think this whole thing would work, and if so, go ahead and pick up a starter kit for testing.
Stay tuned…
Comments
2 Responses to “Still thinking about reporting available seats”
This is so cool! My library is (or I am at least) thinking about the same kind of project. We are not as big, only about 100 seats inside the library. We will therefore do this on a smaller scale. We are still trying to collect info and be inventive about the different solutions. Looking forward to what you find out!
p.s.
Have you seen this? http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/44×201213 (I have not read it all yet, but it seems promising).
Oh wow, thanks for the link Cathrine! I dropped an email to the three guys but haven’t heard anything back yet.