How can we tell if the bathroom is occupied?Where we work the bathroom is down one hall, around a corner, and at the end of another long hall. The walk to the bathroom isn't so bad, but too often one will walk all this way only to find the door locked and the facilities occupied.
I don't mind taking a necessary bathroom break every few hours. I even enjoy the exercise. But when coding is happening, and concentration is at it's peak, that nagging pain in the bladder can be quite an annoyance. At some point you decide that the customer's problems aren't as Pressing as that one and you decide to elevate it to the top of the workload and take care of it instantly. A walk down the hall and REJECTED! Now getting back to working requires a re-prioritizing of the workload again and by the time you're back into the right mode the facilities might be free...
Problem: The bathroom is sometimes full and the only way to tell is to physically get up from the computer and walk down the hall to check.
Situation:
Question: Is there a cheap (free) way that we can set up in order to determine that the bathroom is occupied before leaving the desk?
The good 'ole bathroom pass! Hangs in clear view of all employees; take it with you when you need it. When it's not on the wall, someone's in the bathroom. Doubles as the key to open the door so you HAVE to take it.
Don't do what my elementary school did once: they attached it to a yardstick.
If you want to over-engineer a solution, perhaps MIT could provide some inspiration [1]:
$ finger @bathroom.mit.edu
[nw61-310-8.mit.edu]
Random Hall Bathroom Server v2.1
Bonfire Kitchen: vacant for 32 min
Bonfire Lounge: vacant for 2 hr
Pecker Lounge: vacant for 9 min
Pecker Kitchen: vacant for 33 min
K 282 L 290 K Clam Kitchen: vacant for 84 min
... ... ... ... Clam Lounge: vacant for 26 hr
| o : o | o : o | BMF Lounge: *IN*USE* for 2 min
| o : o | x : o | BMF Kitchen: vacant for 38 min
| o : o | o : o | Loop Kitchen: vacant for 8 min
| x : o | - : o | Loop Lounge: vacant for 5 min
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Black Hole Lounge: vacant for 71 sec
Black Hole Kitchen: vacant for 107 days
o = vacant! Destiny Kitchen: *IN*USE* for 79 days
x = in use Destiny Lounge: vacant for 8 min
Foo: vacant for 38 hr
For more information finger help@bathroom.mit.edu
(They have a similar server for their laundry [2] too)
Or perhaps the more up-to-date fancy web2.0 method, a tweeting toilet [3]?
[1] http://bathroom.mit.edu/If you don't mind a little coding, or can get someone else to do it for you, you might want to get some ideas from this [1] post on Coding4Fun on checking if a bathroom is occupied.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2008/08/13/8859880.aspxSounds like you need to investigate the X10 home automation protocol [1] which should allow you to hook something up to the door (door latches/locks tend to be metal, hence conductors, hence forming a complete circuit) and monitor from an X10 compliant console.
If installing hardware on the door is vetoed, maybe a webcam looking at it (but not the occupants!) ?
Another (manual) solution - have a little flippable sign in the office saying Occupied/Free - when someone leaves for the toilet, they flip it to Occupied, when they return flip it to Free. Free as in beer solution....
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10%5F%28industry%5Fstandard%29+1 for NiceGuyUK's answer... but unfortunately the free solution of the flip-sign involves human interaction, and as any good SU will know - humans will simply screw things up. :)
"In Automation We Trust", is the motto of legions of geeks - if we could automate our entire lives we would, and just spend our lives playing MMORPGs :). It should not involve human interaction anything outside of what is the normal pattern of things - in this case, going to the WC and closing the door.
I used to work in an office that for some reason, everytime the toilet door was closed, a particular ceiling light would go off. We suspect it was because the closed door crimped a wiring along the door frame, but no one voiced it out to the management because it was so darn useful.
I recommend you isolate one wire that controls a lighting source that is visible preferably even before someone gets up to answer a call of nature - and try to get the door closing to trigger a turn-off.
P.S If you got an office electrician - i'm sure he can come up with something for free along these lines.
Very cool question!
There is a paper that uses wireless occupancy sensors using the X10 protocol [1] to do essentially what you are looking for. You may need to free up some time to implement it though!
[1] http://www.kadtronix.com/x10%5Flan.htmYears ago, I investigated creating some stand-alone tiny web server that would show the state of a single switch. Just as a reference, some of the devices and articles I bookmarked then.
Here's a low-tech solution: set up a series of precisely-positioned mirrors so anyone can glance out their office door to see if the bathroom door is open. Run the mirrors about 7 feet high so they're less distracting and less likely to be blocked.
Going a step further, you could install a laser pointer on the bathroom door so a red dot is projected into each employee's office when the bathroom is occupied.
You guys are complicating it too much. You can just put a doorbell switch where the door touches the door jamb. This can then switch on and off a light on the upper floor. Since it's a doorbeel switch (it is only "on" while held), when the bathroom user opens the door, the light will turn off.
Sounds like a third-grade science project to me:
The only time you may have a problem is either when someone takes a leak with the door wide open, or on the rare occasion that the bulb burns out.
Install a web cam.
Sounds like you need to add you bathroom door to the List of Devices Connected to the Internet [1]. You could use something as simple as a web server on a chip to allow you to use a browser to get the status of the lavatory door.
[1] http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers%5Fand%5FInternet/Internet/Devices%5FConnected%5Fto%5Fthe%5FInternet/If the ceiling is high enough, a signal light can be placed there that all employees could see (or maybe you would need two or three to cover everyone). This light can be on when the bathroom is occupied, which can be detected in a number of ways: Something on the door hinge, a sonar, an infrared sensor, etc.
Here is a cheap solution that can be made using off the shelf components...
You'll need these:
All of the above things are easily available.
Now connect the door sensing circuit so as to switch on/off the FM transmitter (the input signal to which can be a beep generated through a 555 IC).
So, before answering nature's call, turn on the radio to check that you don't get REJECTED!
I can smell a nice DIY-bathroom-sensor in the works.
P.S. I don't think it would be an issue, but make sure that transmitting low power F.M. is legal in your country first.
thepaulpage doesn’t work for our company anymore and about a month or two after he left we finally implemented our bathroom notification system. We ended up using:
NetDuino [1]
Ball Door Switch [2]
50ft of Cat5 cable.
We put the ball switch on the door and ran the cat5 to the server room. We programed the NetDuino to listen to the switch and then to report the status to a serial port.
v0.5: We then wrote a small app that listened to the serial port and wrote the result to a text file on the network and anyone could open the file and see the current status.
v1.0: We wrote an php page that checked the file every 2 seconds and reported the result to a company dashboard that a few people use.
V2.0: We wrote a service that checked the file and reported the results to a database. We then wrote a Silverlight client that checks the database and reports the status. This allowed us to add features like toast notification to let you know as soon as the bathroom was available.
V3.0: Yet to be written will include a queue, usage times, charts, the current weather, and a random lol cat.
It works pretty well but I have since moved to right across that hall from the bathroom so there is little incentive for me to continue adding features since I can see the bathroom. My colleges however now have to option of checking the bathroom status from their chairs.
Ps -I realize there is a lot of redundancy in the way the message gets to the end user but it was working and so I didn’t want to go back and rewrite something that worked.
[1] http://netduino.com/A little on the complicated side:
Set up a directional mike in the cube of the guy closest to the bathroom, then hack a program to listen to the "click" of the door closing and opening. Then, upgrade an autoreloading web page's title page so it will show open or busy in the firefox/chrome tab. It could also display how long the room has been busy.
Shout out: "Can I take a wizz? Pass on!" The out-loud question should propagate towards the bathroom until its occupant sends a "No" back or the person nearest the bathroom send a "Yes" back. The answer can propagate back to the asker in a similar fashion.
Alternatively (and to make this more computer-ralated), that question could simply be an e-mail or IM to the person closest to the bathroom.
